


Trigonometry for the Genetically Enhanced

by feldman, Thassalia



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M, M/M, Multi, Post-Avengers (2012), Threesome - F/M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-24
Updated: 2016-07-24
Packaged: 2018-07-26 12:19:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 34,853
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7573813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feldman/pseuds/feldman, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thassalia/pseuds/Thassalia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sexual healing for spies, super soldiers, and scientists.  Directly post-Avengers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue: Talking Smack

Prologue: Talking Smack

Yes, his senses had been heightened by the serum, but sometimes Steve had what Agent Coulson had described as “trouble processing, perfectly normal.” Usually it was visual stimuli–screens, especially video. But, it didn’t happen so much with his hearing, aside from music he hadn’t encountered before.

So when Agent Romanoff arched up on her toes and uttered a kind of Howard Stark proposal in his ear, it had taken him a long moment of staring at her to really let it sink in.

And when he looked at Dr. Banner it was clear the man had (best case scenario) twigged onto the strange tension or (worst case scenario) had heard her matter of fact whisky voice make that bald suggestion. Steve’s eyes skittered off to the distance, like he wasn’t already thinking about being taken down by the two of them, the strategic part of his brain flipping through the helicarrier layout for possible locations--close to the engines, for the cover noise, because God, he’s seen slowed down clips of her fighting and that’s not even taking into account the literal wildcard chewing the inside of his lip while he scans the horizon for the millionth time. Jesus.

Steve has been in the future just long enough not to discount any of this; he has no way of dismissing this possibility now beating and squirming in his chest. If only one of them would break, would make eye contact and chuckle.

~*~

Bruce has known Agent Romanoff for all of forty-eight hours, but that’s long enough to understand her sense of humor can be as vicious and solitary as Bruce himself. Among everything else, she’s a pigtail puller. So when she leans up into Captain Rogers’ ear and says, “We all get out of this alive, I think we should fuck. I bet he and I could make you scream,” it’s all he can do to keep a straight face.

But he does. He’s maybe a pigtail puller himself. Plus, the amusement helps tamp down his anxiety when the blades start rotating and they rise into the air. She may have started out Russian, but there’s something delightfully American about her iconoclasm. She wears it as well as those jeans.

It’s clear Captain Rogers concludes that Bruce hadn’t really heard Romanoff, and he lets Rogers think that. Circumstances get pretty hairy, and Bruce isn’t willing to compromise the man’s focus. And while he’s fairly straight but not a stickler about it, the Other Guy is as interested in sex as a tornado would be. By the time all six of them are stumbling toward the elevators in the Stark Tower lobby, full of shawarma and the satisfaction of a job well done, Bruce has mostly forgotten about the whole thing.

Tony Stark punches the door close button on the express elevator before he’s even fully inside, and while Agent Barton quickly slips past, and Thor strides in and dares the doors to close on him (they snag his cape), Bruce is not currently moving fast for anyone or anything, so they wait for the other undamaged elevator to come back down.

He’s feeling okay, considering he’s hulked out twice since he’s showered last, and smashed the hell out of aliens all afternoon. The guy at the shawarma place, Adib, was much closer to his size and had good taste in cologne. So there’s that.

It’s Steve Rogers’ nervous side-eyed glance between them that reminds Bruce of Romanoff’s lewd suggestion--fuck, was that yesterday? He gives her a frankly curious look, to see what she thinks of Steve’s blush, a clearly visible smear of pink reflected in the brushed chrome of the lobby.

~*~

On the helicarrier deck both men had moved with the wary diplomacy of truce: you seem like a decent enough guy, let’s work together and not hit any sore spots.

Banner had been so cautiously grateful for Rogers’ basic human decency…which was yes, kind of stunning when he really got going, but that wasn’t the point. She hadn’t been able to resist putting Rogers on his back foot and evening out the playing field.

So she’d suggested the first thing to come to mind. At that point, she wasn’t really thinking seriously about any further endgame than locating the Tesseract, finding Clint, and bringing him home. Maybe even alive.

It’s not like Banner would take it seriously anyway, not like he wasn’t constantly analyzing everything she said with bemused distrust.

The look on Rogers’ face, though. That had been interesting. 

Now both men walk loose-limbed, remarkable for each of them in different ways.

Rogers is flushed and dusty, and on the drive over he’d methodically bitten the chap from his lips so they’re healed smooth and dusky pink. He’s lost the stiff bearing Stark seems to starch into him, beaten softer like rock-washed laundry.

Banner looks freshly laid already, shoulders lax, the open posture and rolling stride of a guy who has nothing left to hide. Which she supposes he might even think is true.

They got out alive, except for Coulson. Even Barton, busted apart but already putting himself back together. Even Stark, spit back out from the wormhole like an olive pit.

Only Phil was lost. And that hurts, but it almost seems ungrateful to acknowledge it, with so much disaster avoided. There are many worse ways to go. She could be standing on a porch next to Phil with a goddamned American flag in her hands, making herself knock on the door, knowing Laura had watched them all the way up the drive and already knew.

She locks her knees to keep from wavering with giddy relief and this raw grief she doesn’t want to look at. She pushes the elevator button again.

It’s the soft, slightly smug look on Banner’s face as he catches her eye and looks pointedly at Rogers that brings her words from the helicarrier deck back to her. That gives her something tangible to focus on instead.

Rogers looks like a sunset. Banner looks…game, and she’s…intrigued.

Yes, there’s cementing team connections and bleeding off the stress and adrenaline of the fight, even the painkilling endorphins of orgasm, but frankly there’s also the sheer delight in calling bluffs with Banner, trolling Rogers.

“You have a question, Dr. Banner?”

Rogers locks down a little, eyes pinned to the elevator’s floor display countdown.

Bruce’s faint smile is somehow more smug after he wets his lips. “We doing this?”


	2. Double Dog Dare

Romanoff’s mouth curls, practiced, but no less effective. “Well,” she says. “Alrighty then.”

Banner chuffs out a noise halfway between a gasp and a laugh, and crosses his arms over his chest.

“JARVIS,” she asks the air, “Has Mr. Stark allocated quarters for any of us?”

There’s a moment, and then the elevator says, “Yes, Agent Romanoff. Sir wishes for you to be comfortable.”

She nods to herself. “Are any of them more likely to accommodate…” she pauses, searches for the phrasing. “Recreational activities? Perhaps with a larger living area or bedroom than the others.”

Steve recognizes someone gathering intel, scouting out resources.

“Captain Rogers’ designated quarters have a large living area and a king sized bed. It is the prototype for the other apartments in the tower.”

Romanoff smirks at Steve. “And you thought Stark didn’t like you.”

Steve raises an eyebrow, then barks out a laugh when JARVIS says, with a slightly skeptical lilt, “In the interest of full disclosure, Doctor Banner’s quarters have a superior view and a bathtub.”

She turns to Banner. “Well, clearly we’ve found the favorite.”

“He met me, what, three days ago? He assigned existing spaces. Probably while doing three other things.”

Curiosity curls across her face, and Steve notices now that her upper lip is split, scabbing over. “And mine?”

“I’m to inquire whether you and Agent Barton require joint accommodations. Or any. Sir didn’t know if you’d wish to return to SHIELD.”

“Thank you JARVIS. May I decide later?”

“Of course, Agent.”

She looks at the two men, and says. “I think Steve’s would be the best option. It gives Doctor Banner--”

“Bruce,” He interrupts, mouth held like something’s funny that shouldn't be, “Please. Even if we...well. Bruce.”

“It gives Bruce a place to retreat, I think that would be best.”

“Yes,” he says carefully, “I think it probably would.”

She runs her teeth over her bottom lip, and Banner...Bruce...holds her gaze like a dare, and there’s a shimmer of tension so bright it’s almost visible. Steve swallows hard. He’s no stranger to post-battle adrenaline, the fight or flee or fuck response. Right now? It feels more like fucking, but cautiously, like a breath could send it the other way.

He doesn’t know them, doesn't know what he’s in for, but his instincts are shouting at him to pursue it. Natasha had retrieved Banner from India; he’s both terrified and saved her. They’ve sussed each other out, and it's created something taut and heated. Steve is starting to feel that old familiar itch, the urge to watch, observe, find that string of desire running between them and twang it. Put himself in the middle and feel them vibrate around him.

Having seen them fight today it’s not hard to imagine how either might move in other circumstances. Against him. Against each other. It’d really be something: to watch them tangle, to see them skin to skin. To feel that skin against his once they’re warm and damp and breathless from each other. The image hitches in his chest, an illicit novelty, dangerous. He’s panicky for a second, rubs at his sternum, breathes through it. 

Maybe it’s the tightness in his chest that makes him imagine Bucky’s voice conspiring in his ear, affection and teasing disdain, “ _You gonna let this pass by just because it’s new?_ ” It’s like he’s here in the room egging Steve on, arm slung round his neck.

Steve shakes his head like a dog.

He's fed, he's loose, and the world might be something he barely understands, but the people in it? Well, even these wildly unusual people are still people. That’s not so new. And sex? Sex is definitely not new. Okay, this might be doable.

“You’re not pulling my leg, are you?” he checks in, careful, seeing how much he needs to steer, making sure he’s not setting himself up for disappointment.

Romanoff has a glint in her eye that reminds him of Peggy. A sauciness, tart and bracing. “Only if that’s what you’re into Cap.”

She says it like she can’t imagine there’s anything he likes that she doesn’t know the measure of. Steve’s getting used to that. It's the tone she’d taken on the deck, winding him up.

There was a kid, an agent, at the SHIELD barracks who’d shown Steve how to use the internet. He’d gone very red at one point, and mumbled, “Should Captain Rogers need it, there was pornography online that would cater to your interests, but if you prefer, I could find some movies or magazines. Something analog.”

The kid wasn’t being salacious, just thoughtful, in the same way as the woman who’d walked Steve through kale salad, and the laundry staff who’d offered to put in extra starch. Steve declined the offer, although he’d recognized the kindness in it. 

Steve likes to witness connection. That's hard to type into a search engine.

“We had sex in the forties, Romanoff,” he says, raising an eyebrow and letting his gaze slide over her, then he sees Banner’s face is so bright with curiosity it feels it like a wave through his own chest, a stirring type of need.

“Do tell, Captain,” Banner says, as Romanoff looks at him, her own eyebrow arched in sparking challenge, her hands flexing.

“Please,” she says encouragingly.

The first time he’d learned the difference between simply relieving his own hard dick and being mesmerized by the feeling of need had been at seventeen, stumbling upon Bucky, hand around his reddening cock, squeezing and working the shaft.

Steve had stayed in the shadows, aching and dizzy, mesmerized. When he couldn’t stand it anymore, he fled, heading home to run it through his head, test it on his body, not just the remembered sight of Bucky, jaw slack, cheeks red, but the watching. How the measured distance sparked a different element of desire.

War had amplified his preferences. The chorus girls hadn't been tutors so much as performers, continuing their roles from the stage, keeping that distance even as they shared. They’d had beaux at home, a few with husbands in the Pacific, but on the road they’d wanted companionship and physical release, which they largely found with each other. He'd learned a lot just stumbling upon them, and when they realized he’d keep his hands and any commentary to himself, they’d finally just invited him in to watch.

Steve likes to be invited. He likes to offer an assist. Lead by command and example both.

These two - they’re still teasing him. Pushing. Fishing for reaction because they’re riding their own post-battle comedown, scouting their own territories, tallying their wins and losses. And Steve doesn’t know them, but he knows battle, and he knows aftermath. And he knows what he wants. In this uncertain new world, sometimes it’s the little things. Two dangerous, beautiful people who can jump start something in him. Can put their hands on him, help him remember what it’s like to be warm, sated, comforted even. Lost to something bigger, and smaller, than himself. Lost to hands on his skin, mouths and teeth, and knees brushing, toes along the back of his calf...

God, Steve misses being touched, not just the intimacy of fooling around, or the warmth of friends and family, but casual camaraderie. Seventy-five years since he’s felt skin on skin, aside from medical manhandling, the smash of a fist heading towards him, a handshake across a military deck, Banner’s palm warm and calloused.

The elevator is nearly at its destination. They both look at him, expectant, putting the decision in his hands. Maybe just seeing what Steve does. 

Everything feels like a test these days. Because even if they’ve been teasing, it’s obvious no one will back down if he calls it. It’s hot in here, prickly, uncomfortable. Fraught.

Romanoff’s mouth quirks up, but she's otherwise contained. Outwardly unaffected by the tension. Banner is very still, but his eyes are bright, his hands banding each other.

Steve would like to see Romanoff’s cheeks flushed with pleasure, panting her need in his ear. The surprise is that he'd also welcome the sight of Banner’s skin heated, tipping him over the edge towards release. He’s always gone more for the mouthy ones, loose and ready. Nothing like these two bastions of control.

“ _But you love a challenge, punk_.” Yeah, Steve thinks, I surely do.

“Maybe we go to my bunk,” he says, and it’s just that easy. He’ll give them an out, but he’s hoping, praying, they won’t take it. “Just see what’s what. No...commitment, maybe just a beer.”

~*~

Curiosity killed the cat, or in Bruce’s case, killed a whole lot of healthy cells and replaced them with a bright green package and a metric fuck ton of concussive force. So since then Bruce has been working on tabling curiosity along with his baser urges, mastering control.

He used to like sex. He has reason to believe he could like it again. But he hadn’t really considered that he might test that theory with a partner, let alone two. 

Once he’d figured out that it was anxiety driving the Other Guy and not the physical beats per minute, he was able to do some solo work, concluding that maybe, someday, under very specific conditions, he could duet again. He never considered a trio.

Following Rogers on a mission to work through post-whatever the fuck they did today through sex? Was offering one hell of a potential test--scientific and sexual curiosity twining together into a kind of temptation Bruce is nearly powerless against.

He rubs his thumb over his knuckles and maybe it's adrenaline, the unexpected day or just his damnable curiosity but there's a curl of heat running through him and he wants to pursue it. He might never get another chance.

The Other Guy is sated right now. He broke a whole lot of shit, and Bruce let him out on purpose, and those two things have left him feeling mostly in charge of his own body, his libido and reactions and desires, in a way he really hasn’t in a very long time. 

Natasha walks just slightly ahead of him, and he can't tell whether it's uncouth or not to enjoy the sway of her ass in that catsuit, the power and control in her movements, effortlessly sensual, deliberately at ease.

Steve’s shoulders are very broad and it's really fucking difficult not to still be a little awed by him. He kind of...glows, even battle spent and embarrassed and leading them into a new fray.

The truth is he’s horny. If he's honest...a bit lonely. And deeply tired of feeling solely his own hand on his dick.

He hasn’t experienced uncomplicated lust in so long that it’s a novelty.

Steve puts his hand on a door that's just barely recessed into the wall, and when nothing happens, Natasha points out the palm lock.

He looks over his shoulder like he's checking his troops and she gives Steve a gentle, encouraging smirk, a tight nod.

Casual, glorious want has worked its way into Bruce's bones and it's something he’d really like to share with this awe-inspiring international icon, and a woman who has in the past three days a) held a gun on him b) lied to him c) rolled him into an epic trolling of said American institution d) nearly died by his hand and e) forgiven him with a twist of her lush mouth.

He's ready and willing to follow these two into battle, whether that means fighting or fucking.

“Lead on, Cap,” he says.


	3. Simon Says

The curtains open with a whisper as they enter, giving them all a stunning view of the space. 

The rooms are sleek and modern with a large sunken living area - chrome and glass and thick white furry rugs and pillows, a low slung white couch and mounted flat screen and an egg-shaped chair dangling from the ceiling. There are touchscreen panels in the walls and a black marble bar with white bar stools on the other side, perfect cut crystal decanters and slim lights and a bowl of chrome fruit. It's part Goldfinger, part porn set. Gorgeous and awful and made for decadence.

Or for Tony Stark, who is kind of a Bond villain after all. Bruce stifles a laugh behind his hand.

Rogers stares, jaw open, and Romanoff starts to chuckle, warm and throaty, so genuinely amused that Bruce can't look away. She's so lovely. She catches his eye, winces around her grin and brushes at the cut on her mouth.

“We can’t possibly…” She gestures down to the lounge. “I mean we’re collectively filthy.”

They turn as a unit to the bed which is tucked into a large open area on the left. It’s giant, with dark grey sheets and a sleek, quilted duvet with silvery accents, a silver silk upholstered armchair to the side next to an end table.

Bruce has lived in rooms smaller than that bed.

He lets himself hope, briefly and not without irony, that his own is even half that nice. But there's no denying that the detritus of the battle will cover those perfect sheets like a travesty.

“Just imagine the shower, though,” Natasha murmurs in his ear, and he breathes in reflexively. Faint traces of sweat and gunpowder residue mingle with the scent rising from her skin - warm, luscious, heady. Female. Amazing. The lust suddenly shifts from abstract to specific, as shocking as his transformation, and his knees get a little weak. He could drown in that scent, wants to bury his face in her neck, the back of her knees, lick the underside of her breasts, scrape his teeth over her inner thigh, slide his tongue along...everywhere.

Thing is, Rogers isn’t any better. Bruce can smell Steve too, tangy and coppery, salt and concrete dust and something musky that’s maybe serum related, or maybe not, but it’s good. Captain America, even filthy as fuck, smells really fucking good.

God, he’s hard up. It has been so, so long. He wonders if the shock of battle, of success, has just melted his brain. Decides he doesn’t care. 

“Feel free to veto,” he says to the two of them, “but I’m good if you are.”

~*~

Steve raises an eyebrow. “So we’re good skipping the beer?”

“Unless you need to wet your whistle,” Romanoff says, lips twitching. “Wouldn't want your mouth too dry to scream.” It’s as much an answer as Banner’s choked snort.

“Funny,” Steve says, “you're funny.”

All teasing aside, they're waiting for him, still looking for his signal.

Steve takes a deep breath. Time to send out a sentry. See if they're more than talk.

"Could you," he's a little raw, swallows, starts over with confidence. "I'd like to see you two, first. If it's really about what I want..." Dark curiosity sparks in Romanoff's eyes and she catches Banner's gaze, says "Doc?"

Her tone is 100% dare and Steve feels it familiar in his gut; it’s fueled every bad decision he's ever made. Honestly, maybe _every_ decision he’s ever made, every time he’s railed against anything or carved a path where they wasn’t one before. Instead of answering, Banner steps forward and raises his hand to her face, fingers on her cheekbone brushing around the bruise with a tentative delicacy, so contrary to the brute physicality of his alter ego that it leaves Steve breathless. She must feel it too because her stillness grows welcoming. She lifts her chin, tacit permission, a whole conversation they're having without him. Banner’s hand is shaking a little as he bends down to whisper into her ear, and when she gives a subtle shake of her head, he leans in and kisses her with this slow, heated deliberation that goes straight to Steve's groin. Romanoff wraps her hand around Banner’s fingers to steady him, and her whole body softens into the kiss, giving in, but taking too, the curve and angle of her supple body melting against him. 

Banner slides his other arm around her waist and holds her closer. She sinks her free hand into his curls, flexing with a shiver of want, and makes a fist. Banner moans. There's electricity between them, smoldering and alive, and Steve swallows, fighting the urge to adjust himself in his uniform.

Romanoff breaks the kiss, but doesn't move away. She throws a glassy-eyed glance at Steve. "Like that?" she asks. Behind her, Banner looks awed, a little stunned. 

"Yeah," Steve says. "God, yes."

~*~

What Banner says low in her ear is, ”It's been a long time,” not apology, but explanation. As he touches her face, she realizes that he isn't just talking about sex but about this: tangible, tactile connection with another human being.

She suspects it's been years since anyone has offered him basic human tenderness, since he’s touched anyone else outside of therapeutic care.

Natasha was raised as a solitary figure, meant to survive alone, but it’s been nearly a decade since she’s had to by necessity. She’s learned the value of touch, and that tremble in Banner's hand nearly nixes this endeavor for her. Who is she to bring him back into humanity’s fold? And yet she already bears that burden, and cannot be sorry for it. Perhaps there’s still restitution to be found.

His kiss is warm and confident, giving and taking. Deliciously unsettling. She wants more of his taste, the solid feel of him against her, the way he holds her like she’s granting him an indulgence. But they're also here for Rogers, and she wants to find out what unlocks desire for him, what turns the voyeurism into a hands-on experience. Two parallel tracks here, one end goal, and possibly multiple orgasms for her if she executes this directive skillfully enough.

She nudges Banner backwards to the bed, then presses on his shoulder so he sinks down onto it. He looks around in protest, eyes a little wild, like the boldness of the kiss is losing out to the reality of the situation, but she urges him to scoot back from his perch on the edge of the mattress. She unbuckles her utility belt, unstraps some of the knives from the suit, secures her Glocks and piles her gear on the chair. When she turns to face Steve, Bruce at least curves his hand around her hip, though still too gently. 

She presses his fingers to her hipbone, discouraging hesitance, and he gets with the program and tugs her down to sit between his thighs. The heat of him sears through her, warmer than a normal person, maybe from the transformation or the radiation that surges through him. It gives Rogers a pretty view, but it also shows Bruce that she trusts him at her back. The thing is, it's not an act. There are alliances forged in battle that overcome other, instinctual reactions. She does trust him, probably more than he trusts himself. And maybe, sometimes, that shiver of fear can be an aphrodisiac. But the promise had been making Rogers scream, and it's clear they're going to need to do that together.

She motions Rogers closer. He approaches, slow and methodical. 

"What's the plan, Cap?" He needs a task, she’s willing to follow his direction, and giving Banner some guidance in this may also keep him from second guessing himself. "Zipper," Rogers says, low and needy, his eyes falling to her breasts. She gives him a smile, starts to slide the zipper down, but he shakes his head. “No.”

Oh. "Doc," she murmurs, “a little help." She turns and climbs into Bruce’s lap without further ceremony, giving a nod of permission at the question in his gaze. His eyes darken and he takes hold of her uniform zipper, undoing it so slowly that she can feel her pulse thump in her throat. His other hand follows the trail of skin as it appears in front of him and she breathes through the touch, goosebumps breaking out. She cants her head back in pleasure to find Rogers only a hairsbreadth away.

He tilts her chin further, bending down to kiss her as Bruce peels the uniform off of her arms, and unhooks the heavy gauge sports bra behind her back, helping her with that as well. Rogers kisses like he's figuring something out, sweet and determined, and it’s heady in a much different way than Bruce, whose talented mouth is now pressing against her breastbone, sliding to the right to lick and nip at the swell of one breast while his warm, calloused palm cups and supports the other, thumb sliding over the nipple.

Steve strokes her throat with his big hand and cradles her skull. Bruce's teeth close gently over her nipple, her breasts swollen and tight with his ministrations.

She digs her fingers into his hair, silky and a little gritty with dust. She reaches back to touch Steve, completing this circuit between the three of them and it zings through her, straight to her cunt. She clenches her thighs against Bruce and he makes a sound low in his throat, primal and needy, and Steve moans in response, licking into her mouth, getting a little sloppy with want. _Fuck_ , she thinks. It’s better than she could have anticipated.

~*~

Steve breaks for air, for a moment to think, but that’s a tactical error because the kissing is one thing, but when he straightens he can see where the hands have gone while he wasn’t looking. 

Banner has slipped one down the back of Romanoff’s open uniform, and the muscles of his forearm flex as he kneads with the slow roll of her hips. Meanwhile, she has one arm wrapped around his shoulders to stroke delicately behind his ear.

The other has been deftly unfastening Steve’s utility belt, which thumps to the floor and causes Banner to shift his head to look, nipple still caught between his lips. He smirks, and Steve sees the rosy flesh is actually caught gently between teeth. Steve exhales sharply. Romanoff is watching him as her hand unsnaps the side flap of his jacket to get at his own zipper, and he can see where this is headed if he stays within reach, so he takes a step back.

He does strip off his jacket as he goes to the chair, and pulls it within feet of the bed. His uniform lining is a strange fabric like Romanoff’s bra, which feels dry even when soaked with sweat, and he peels it off for good measure, leaving him in his undershirt. Men don’t wear them anymore, but he feels uncomfortably naked without one. Ironic really, in the face of this.

She approves of the compromise, or perhaps Banner’s gotten her attention again by licking a stripe between her breasts and up the side of her neck. Steve thinks he wants to know what that tastes like, so before he sits down he takes the same handful of hair Romanoff had grabbed earlier and uses it like a handle to tilt Banner’s head back and lay one on him.

Skin salt, and a faint lingering spice from the meal. He’d just wanted to taste what that lick was like, maybe show a little equal opportunity, and he’d expected the grit of stubble, but not the softness of the lips, the way Banner’s mouth opens and lets him in and makes him want to stay.

“Yeah,” Romanoff breathes, and her fingers slip under his shirt to scratch his belly, slip down to hook in the waistband of his uniform trousers.

Steve encircles her wrist and redirects her hand, easing up and taking a seat almost within reach, and retrieves his belt from the floor. There were a few swapouts of the tools and supplies he’d kept in the belt pouches back in Europe, but rubbers had been a standard supply even then.

~*~

You’d think the threesome with a deadly spy and a national icon would be the punchline, but Bruce sees Captain America pop a snap on his utility belt and pull out a strip of large size condoms and thinks, _nope, that’s the punchline_.

“You really are the ultimate Boy Scout, aren’t you?” Romanoff asks, and there’s a crack in her cynicism that’s almost fond. She’s also busy rucking up Bruce’s shirt.

“Never was a Scout, ma’am.” Steve’s settled enough to give her a lopsided smile, like the distance of all of two feet makes this bearable, makes him okay in a way he wasn’t when he was closer. “Asthma. I couldn’t camp out in the woods, in the damp, and that was the whole point; to take city boys out to the woods to make them men.”

“I thought it was earning merits and a good deed every day?” She turns to Bruce, eyes sharp, “No wait, that’s you.”

“Be nice,” he chides, pulling her flush against his chest. She keeps pulling up his shirt from the back.

“Oh, see, that’s not me at all.”

She squirms against him, eyebrow raised, and he kisses her, nipping at her lip, getting a wince from her as she bites back and grinds down on him. Amazing, and not nice at all. So much better than nice.

She teases, “Got lubrication there, Boy Scout?”

Rogers actually checks his belt and Bruce uses the time to wriggle his hand back down into her uniform to cup the perfect swell of her ass. She’s hot and damp, and the scent of her sex is making him a little giddy.

“Not in there,” she interrupts Steve. “This is Tony Stark’s guest room. Check the bedside table.”

Steve opens the drawer and pulls out several small bottles. “Well,” he says. “the 21st century does offer variety.”

“Move your arms.”

Steve looks puzzled, but Bruce knows she’s talking to him. “Bossy.”

“Yes.”

He lets go of her ass with reluctance and she attacks the problem from the front, unbuttoning the shirt and pulling it down his arms, trapping them against his sides.

Bruce says, “I’m not sure that’s a great idea--”

“You won’t know until you try,” she says, pupils huge as she does something with the shirt that catches his wrists behind him, and pushes him back on the bed. 

“Yeah,” Rogers says. “Like that.”

“Good.” Her hands are on his fly, clever and delicate, as her breasts sway gorgeous and heavy against her slim chest. “Rogers, shirt.”

Bruce shifts his hands to lay flat under his back, pinned by her weight on his thighs. She’s milk pale, cuts and bruises an odd beautiful contrast, her uniform dangling off her hips and it should be ridiculous, but he’s entranced, and awed, and a little weirded out because he keeps remembering that he doesn’t do this, that he shouldn’t do this, what the hell is this, what the hell is he doing? But then her nails are raking over his cock through the pants, and she unzips him, peeling the sides of the fly open, leaning down to suckle the tender skin over his hip bone.

Her mouth is hot, kiss blistering, and when he bucks up against her she makes a happy little moan, nuzzling her way to the other side, the other hollow.

“Beautiful,” she murmurs, just barely audible. Bruce is struggling a little with how much control he’s inadvertently ceded to these two, control he normally fights with all his being to maintain, but he feels...safe in this moment, held between their strength, their perfections. The weight of her on his thighs and her soft hair trailing across his belly, just brushing the head of his cock; the way Rogers says, “More,” with this confident directness.

She chuckles against his skin, countering, “Shirt first.”

“I thought I was calling it.” 

“That was before I found out you wore a cotton undershirt under your tech shirt.” She’s shimmying back, dragging the weight of her breasts down Bruce as she goes. “One defeats the purpose of the other. That earns you a demerit.”

“I told you, I was never a Scout,” Steve grouses.

“Hmm.” She drops down to a squat to pull off the loafers - Adib had offered socks, but Bruce had long forsworn restrictive clothing - then kneels on the bed and starts tugging off his pants.

“I feel disappointed,” Bruce says, kind of giddy as he lifts his hips, “that Captain America is not a team player.”

Natasha tosses his pants over her shoulder and gives him a brilliant smile, “Yes, exactly.” She looks pointedly at Steve, but he’s looking right past her.

Suddenly Bruce clocks that he’s naked, hard and aching, while these two - both of whom still have a fuckload of clothing on - look at him like he’s something delicious. How has this even become his life?

He doesn’t sound like himself when he says, “Please, can you…” he looks at Rogers. “Her uniform…something?”

Romanoff wets her bottom lip and holds her look at Rogers.

He nods like awarding them a point and strips off his undershirt, even going so far as to pop open the double snap of his fly before settling back into the chair.

“Demerit cleared,” she says, turning her full attention back to Bruce in a way that makes him squirm on his hands.

~*~

Bruce is splayed out like a meal for her, lovely and decadent, cock hard and heavy against his thigh. She runs her nails along his leg toward it to get the gasp she’s looking for, the reflexive roll of his balls. 

She runs her fingers up through the trail of hair on his belly, where it thickens on his chest, and leans in to lick one rigid pink nipple. His cock twitches against her hip, and he’s squirming against her when Steve hooks his fingers into the side of the dangling uniform and tugs her back.

“It’s only fair,” he says. “We shouldn’t leave him naked all alone.”

“I can make it worthwhile for him,” she says, breathless, and she can, “even half dressed.” Can make it so good for both of them, her cunt dripping, swollen. Her whole body feels swollen with desire. 

“I want this, though,” Steve says, and yes. That’s right. That was the promise, and of course Captain America wants to play fair. 

Bruce rolls onto his side to give his hands relief from his weight, to get a better view as she stands in the small space between the bed and the chair, puts her foot up on Steve’s thigh, bends over and unzips her boot. He helps her pull it off, and they repeat the process.

Keeping her back to Bruce, she peels the kevlar off with a shimmy it doesn’t require, and kicks it to the side. She’s absolutely aware of the way her ass is framed by the small black uniform shorts, the contrast of dark against pale, and she bends at the waist to kiss Steve slow and dirty. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Bruce is an ass man, but the groan behind her is gratifying nonetheless.

She stands back up, and for a second is surprised that Bruce is still balanced on his side, no friction for his cock or freedom for his hands, which he could easily pull out of the twist of shirt, but he's just hanging there abiding.

She’s not sure if she’s rewarding his control or pushing it farther when she slides her thumbs into the shorts, and slowly eases them down her hips and thighs until the only other color on her body is the pink of her nipples and the red hair on her head, the curls over her cunt. She drops the fabric next to his face and turns to Steve, running her fingers along his collarbone, “Now what?”

~*~

Banner is looking a little wild-eyed and aching, and Steve is starting to worry that Romanoff’s play may backfire and they’ll all end up smashed into the carpet. So when he takes a deep breath and closes his eyes, asking to be untied with a tamped down waver to his voice, Steve gives her a nod.

She makes a moue of disappointment, but undoes Banner’s hands. He doesn’t wait for Steve’s direction to roll off the bed, roll out his shoulders, hook a hand around her thigh and say, strangled, “I’d like to taste you.”

And Steve has to shift himself in his pants because at her assent, Banner falls to his knees, nudges her to lean over the bed, palms her cheeks, and buries his face between her thighs.

She gasps, back arching, clawing into the coverlet, strings of silk catching in her finger nails.

He’s not sure what Banner is doing with his hands, so he moves closer to see. She’s making these desperate, needy noises as his tongue traces the damp, delicate, succulent flesh in front of him.

A thrill runs through Steve, thoughts of tongues and fingers rimming his own flesh, probing his own openings and he’s not ready to fuck or be fucked, but he wants to touch something, someone, both of them maybe, and he moves to them, a palm on Bruce’s neck, reaching forward to drag fingers through her heat, sliding over the swollen bud of her clitoris. Natasha bucks up at the touch. 

They work in tandem, Bruce fucking her with his fingers, tongue tracing her lips, the puckered whorl of her ass, the space between, Steve working her clit and keeping Bruce steady and Natasha spasms and cries out, shuddering and shattering, the feeling of it like a brutal, beautiful wave of sensation breaking between them all.


	4. Losing Your Marbles

Natasha comes around, then turns around to see Steve’s hands framing Bruce’s face as he half kisses him, half licks him clean, and a hard aftershock rolls through her. Bruce’s eyes slit open just enough for him to spot her hand and pull it toward Steve’s zipper. He wraps an arm around Steve’s neck to pull him down as he surges upward, wanton distraction for her as well as Steve, but she powers through and focuses on the mission.

For a loner, Bruce really does have a good sense of teamwork when the chips are down.

She gets the pants open and partway down Steve’s thighs before he cottons on, but by then she’s cupped his balls through the gaping fly of his rumpled boxers, and Bruce has a handful of the curvaceous powerhouse that is Captain America’s ass.

~*~

Bruce is giddy, drunk with her taste, the feeling of her orgasm, with the follow up taste of Captain America’s tongue down his throat. All of those aching, lonely years have rushed up on him, and his skin is on fire. 

Male or female or fucking alien, he doesn’t care as long as it’s skin to skin, hands and tongues, and the scent of sex.

He wants to drown in her, all that rolling, shuddering need surging against him. His cock is twitching, dying to be buried in slick, tight heat.

And then there's Steve’s skin, the solid, satisfying flexing muscle of his ass, that warm hand on his neck, that pressure and support. The generous, giddy surge of want when he looks at Steve is its own breathless statement. Bruce’s fingers tangle with Natasha’s, his tongue tangling slow and thorough with Rogers’ as he sucks her taste off Bruce’s tongue, his mouth, the stubble on his cheeks. It's so clear that Steve is...hungry. And maybe a little lost, and it’s so easy then--to strip him down, to bare him so that he’s as naked, and vulnerable, and needy as they are.

Bruce keeps his eyes open, because drowning in sensation is all very well and good, but he hasn’t felt anything like this in, well, ever, and he wants to see it. Wants to prove that it’s true. Natasha’s cheeks are flushed, glowing and he can’t wait to feel that skin against his again. looks at Steve, awed by acres of perfect flesh and muscle and bone and it all…

It all shifts.

Because Steve _is_ perfect skin and muscle and bone. Steve is...what he was made to be and the irony catches so hard and fast and painful in Bruce’s chest that he almost doubles over.

Rogers is beautiful, because he was made to be, acorn into oak. He was made, with the same dream Bruce had spent a career chasing, and he’s everything that Bruce failed to harness, to build. To become.

All Bruce can do is choke on that.

~*~

There’s a gash across Steve’s chest that must have hurt like hell when it happened, would have required stitches in another man, but is now softening down to an angry pink line. Bruce is looking at that smooth, perfect chest like he’s seeing the birth of a universe.

Nat won’t lie. Captain America naked is definitely awe inspiring, but that’s not what’s got Banner so awed, or at least not all of it. His eyes are very dark; his hand is trembling. The two of them standing there--nude and still filthy--are kind of awkwardly heartbreaking. Strung, breathless tension between them, and it’s not from lust, and that switched so quickly that Nat’s not sure what happened.

She just knows that Banner keeps surprising her, and Rogers looks like he’s about to cry, face twisted with an emotion she recognizes as compassion.

“Coulson,” Rogers’ voice is soft, respectful, “he said you’d been studying the serum, that when it happened…”

Of course. Natasha flushes with the realization, surprised that Rogers got there first. 

Banner’s voice is hoarse. “I spent years…” he says, then shakes his head. “The serum was supposed to help. Offer a protection, and instead it...became…”

There is shame stealing across Banner’s face, and it’s so different from mere moments ago as they’d stripped Steve down to nothing, laughing and teasing, relishing his blush, his bossiness. The shadow of the legend has overcome the actual man standing there, hard and perfectly formed, representing everything Bruce had failed to do. Failed to be.

The cut on her own lip is healing with its own unnatural rapidity, and she hopes they won't clue into that fact. The last thing any of them need is more mad science to process. Right now, as Banner stares admonishment in the face, she wants nothing more than to remind him of the decadent sensuality of the past half hour or so. 

This can be salvaged. Has to be.

“Touch him,” she says, soft and as gentle as she can be, brushing her mouth over Bruce’s shoulder. “He’s still just human.” 

Bruce looks at her, surprise widening his eyes. She kisses him, gentle reassurance in her tongue stroking along his lips, and he moans into her mouth, grateful. Then he turns back and reaches out, hand so close to Steve’s chest, like he’s asking permission before dragging gentle fingers over the healing cut. Steve cups his hand around Bruce’s skull, an anchor, and brings him closer, that supernatural warmth of focus so welcoming, his ultimate gift of leadership. 

Bruce is still dazed and dumbstruck, Steve dark-eyed, trying to fumble control back into his grasp, and Natasha is just trying to salvage what's left of this.

It had been, for the few moments when she was coming undone under their collective touch, something close to transcendent.

They all deserve that.

Bruce presses his mouth to the skin near the wound and shudders, fingers flexing as Steve tilts his head back and breathes through his nose. The reverence is too much. She has to bring it back around to something more human. 

She catches Bruce’s flexing hand, and he clenches down, grasping her fingers. She touches Steve’s ribs, making him gasp. Bruce tilts up his face and Steve kisses him again, slow with intent, a deep, drugging kiss, all teeth and tension. She’s caught up between them, a conductor of heat and electricity. The circuit completes and it lights up in both of them, a remembrance of what they can offer each other.

“Bed,” she says. “We’ve got a job to do.”

“Okay,” Bruce says, “yes.”

Steve’s eyes flit between them, and he nods.

They turn together and she pulls them down with her.

~*~

She kneels next to Steve, nudging him to lay his head on the pillow, pulling Bruce to stretch out on his other side. She leans over to kiss Bruce, a palm on Steve's chest for balance, licking into his mouth and then tugging him down to kiss Steve again.

She watches them, dark and light, the soft black hair that outlines Bruce’s lean form a marked contrast to Steve's smooth golden musculature. It stirs something fierce and protective in her, a throb in her sex when Steve suckles at Bruce’s neck. Natasha reaches down and takes Steve’s cock in her hand. It's red and straining and feels, thankfully, so fucking real - as aching and painful as anyone’s and she tightens her grip, strokes along his length and he whimpers at her touch.

“Not yet,” he pleads against Bruce’s neck.

“Okay,” she takes her hand away and fights the urge to roll her eyes, because who is she to judge what he needs?

Bruce sits back on his heels, head cocked like this is a puzzle. It's a good look on him.

She knows how to read people, is looking for the tics and cues that tell her how to nudge these two in a direction. Instinct and intel suggest that Banner's probably never been up close and personal with a dick that's not his own, but he's also a scientist and a scholar and a curious improbable monster, and he doesn't seem fussed by it. Wouldn't be here otherwise, she supposes, facing off with her on either side of Rogers, hands on golden skin slow and contemplative like he isn’t himself rock hard. Reaction has suggested that Steve, on the other hand...well, has had his hands in all manner of pies. Or at least wrapped those perfect lips around a cock or two. 

"Just let us," she says to him, skating her fingers ever so lightly up the inside of his thigh, assessing his response, weighing the potential there if they build him slow enough. Getting off with mouths and hands is hardly a poor showing, but...let's be clear. She wants to feel one or both of them inside her, preferably slamming into her with desperate need; wants to see them break open themselves. That’s her endgame now. To be consumed with pleasure, to not have room to contemplate loss, to put off confronting the changes her world now holds…

Sure, fingers and tongues can do that, but she ventures that getting Steve well and truly fucked will give him something to hold on to as well.

They find sensitive spots all over his body-- nipples and palms, and the crease where his ass meets his thigh, the webbing between his toes, high up on his side.

The same skills that she utilizes to extract information come in handy here. Bruce, she thinks, is going by medical knowledge and shared anatomy. He's approaching it like something to solve, with an intensity of focus that is erotic in its myopia, fingers caressing and kneading, lips and tongue and teeth against the delectable flesh. He's in a zone, listening to his own deep pleasure centers. Having had his hands on her - wanting them on her again - she knows his instincts are sound. They tangle over Steve periodically, a hand trailing over her breast or thigh, a detour to brush her fingers against his cock, and it just makes things even more druggingly surreal, more intense.

Steve finally begs them to stop teasing, reaching down to catch a hand in her hair. She's got his leg up over her hip, nails gentle over his balls and he pleads,"more," in this way where she knows just what he means, and she reaches for the lube. 

Steve is musky and throbbing and she says, low and soft to Bruce, "We should taste him."

She leans down and licks the tip, savoring the bitter salt taste and scent, then takes him more fully, feeling the stretch of her jaw and the press of his heavy cock against her tongue. She sucks, and presses her hand, still clenching the bottle of lube, against Steve's taut belly as he arches up into her mouth. She works him for a few more moments before sliding off with a pop, sloppy and wet, and then Bruce's face is right there, kissing her and licking the taste from her mouth.

Steve whimpers and they turn to him, his eyes so wide and dark and needy.

Bruce wraps his hand around Steve and blushes, but his grip is firm and sure and then he takes him into his mouth. She can't help touching him, fingers against his cheek, in his hair, reassurance and encouragement. Desire.

~*~

Steve whines again, hands flexing at the hot mouth on his cock, at the sound of a cap being flicked open, at the stretch of his leg over Natasha’s as she sits between his spread knees, fluttering fingers on his thighs, the cheeks of his ass. He's open, exposed, and then he gasps at the pressure against his hole, gentle but determined and then she's inside him, and it has been...a lifetime. A world and universe ago, and Steve arches into the touch, the gentle thrust, and she doesn't wait for permission to withdraw and add more fingers, more pressure, more stretch as she works him, finding the spot that makes him thrash. Bruce slides off him with a sucking sound and then works him with far more finesse with his hand.

The pressure is so much, internal and external and she must have her whole goddamned fist inside him, except he knows she doesn't, it's just been so long. She presses deep on that spot and he cries out as the wave rolls through him and he feels her hand join Bruce's on his dick, their grip sure and firm, friction just right, relentless, and he comes, the liquid splattering his belly, hips arching off the bed, clenching down on her fingers. 

~*~ 

Bruce’s jaw is tired but he can’t help kissing Natasha’s smirk, their hands still tangled around Steve’s cock, surrounded by the scent of super soldier spunk and the sound of his labored breathing, like a part of his brain hasn’t forgotten the asthma, like his lungs are still haunted by the wheeze when his oxygen deficit is high.

He can tell when she slips her fingers free, from the shudder of the man between them, and the way her focus on the kiss sharpens. She’s making boasts and promises with her tongue, and Bruce has been so fucking patient that he actually lets loose an audible growl when Steve pulls her away by the shoulders.

“Easy,” she says to Bruce, as Steve wraps her in a hug that should make her look small, swallowed in his embrace, but makes _him_ look small instead, sweaty and shaking and clinging to her like he’s been wrecked.

“I’m good,” Bruce lies.

She rakes her fingers through the short hair at Steve’s nape and croons, ostensibly to him though she’s looking hot challenge at Bruce, “Any thoughts on deployment, Captain?”

He gathers himself enough to pull his head from the crook of her shoulder and scoot up to sit against the headboard. He still looks ruddy and devastated. He shifts her to sit back low against his chest and now they’re both looking at Bruce, her arms draped over Steve’s long muscled thighs like she’s lounging on a goddamned throne.

Bruce looks at her and thinks they’ve accomplished the mission, they’ve made Steve Rogers scream and cream. She looks like she’s ready to go again but he’s not going to push. He’s crazy and aching with want, his body buzzing with how much skin he’s touched after years of denial, torrential rain pouring into an empty cistern.

He stays kneeling where he is, and he doesn’t even touch himself, just watches Steve’s graceful hands trail up her arms and run delicate arcs around her breasts, up her neck, down her belly and back again. Her nipples are pebbled and tight, her legs restless as she presses her thighs together and shifts, indirect friction.

She’s starting to get twitchier than she can control, which is fascinating, that she’s letting Steve do that, letting Bruce see that.

He could half convince himself just this would be enough, if it had to be. But as the moment draws out he can’t help but push for more. “I’m curious...”

Her tongue darts to wet her lips, unstudied, and the rawness of need spikes through Bruce. Her voice is rough and uneven, “Shoot.”

He crawls forward a little, and she opens a space for him, running her feet and calves up around his hips. Her eyes are now dark green rims, her breath quickening, and Steve is touching them both with that maddeningly light deliberate stroke, down Bruce’s back, up her sides, across her upper chest. “What does Natasha want?”

~*~

She wants...well, she wants to go back to a time before aliens and wholescale destruction and losing people she cared for. Before she’d looked something in the eye that she couldn’t fight or fuck or flirt with. She wants to sleep for maybe four days. She wants a drink. A bath. A change of clothes. Restitution. Retribution. To see Clint’s kids, hang out in the hammock with Laura and drink spiked lemonade. A life without blood and death. 

She’s itchy with need. She’d like to be fucked, imagines Rogers big hands cupping her breasts as Bruce strokes into her, slow and deep, dark eyes locked with hers. She shudders and twitches but it's not...she needs something else first.

She wants to see Bruce come apart. The combination of Rogers’ glancing touches and the heated, desperate weight of Bruce’s gaze is leaving her dry mouthed with desire, and a surprising amount is centered on the thought of watching him shed that beautiful control, cracking with pleasure as a hands-on antidote to the break in control that put them at terrifying odds earlier. 

There’s something breathtaking about his desperation and the way he manages it. The duality of his control: fear and adrenaline; lust and need, fighting and fucking as two halves of a coin. Taking orders for the greater good.

_That_ ,she thinks, _I want to guide that break_.

“Steve,” she says, and even Captain America recognizes the authority she infuses into her voice as she trades her own pleasure for his. Or rather, transfers the source of her pleasure. Because watching him, them, will give her pleasure, give her the space to figure out what else she wants. “I know you’re comfortable in a leadership role, but how would you feel about an assist?”

Steve scratches lightly along Bruce’s thigh, and his cock visibly twitches. “Happy to lend a hand.”

“Not where I thought you’d go with that,” Bruce says, voice edged but not displeased, and he rakes a hand down her body, thumb dragging over her nipple, belly, between the lips of her sex, and she’s so wet and ready for him that she nearly changes her mind. 

Instead, she reaches forward to cup his balls, a firm solid grip on his cock while she licks into his mouth, teeth pulling against his lip. The sound he makes isn’t even a whimper, and it shoots straight through her, pulsing in her sex.

“You want to know what I want? I want to watch you come.”

~*~

His head is jammed into the join of Steve’s shoulder and he’s desperately trying to keep his eyes open, but there’s a big, solid hand working his dick, an equally solid wall of chest holding him up, a thick cock hot and twitchy against his ass. Bruce is digging his fingers into Steve’s neck, hips pistoning like he’s being fucked, watching Natasha spread open in front of him like a goddamned smorgasbord, three fingers buried in her sopping cunt, other hand tweaking her nipple, streams of gorgeous, breathtaking filth coming out of her mouth as she tells them everything she’d like to see them do.

“Watch him spread you out on this bed, fuck you with that big, perfect cock. Watch you suck him dry. Your tongue in his ass. Watch you kiss, both hard and aching, wrapped around each other. Take you both, fucked from both sides. So many permutations of fucking and being fucked…” 

Her pupils are so dilated and her voice is raspy, amused, but still controlled and he doesn't know how she's managing it. She’s manipulating them both, and it’s working and it doesn’t matter as Steve ruts against him, jacks him, hands and cock slick with lube, and it’s that last image that sends him right to the edge. Not just the idea of the two of them inside her, but the way it curves her mouth up like she’s not teasing them anymore, not playing, that she's made a decision, and she adds another finger, stretching herself, and he gasps out, “ _Please_.”

Steve tightens his grip, gives three quick jerks, and then Bruce is coming, spilling over her perfect thighs and Steve’s perfect grip and the perfect dark silk of the coverlet.

He’s so shaky with the release that he tumbles onto his hands and knees, barely there for a moment before she’s pulling him into her arms. He’s used and sated, and so deeply weirded out - not from getting jerked off by Captain America, because it’s just been that kind of day - but from the overwhelming amount of contact, of putting his fears and his anger and his monster aside. From being able to, so unexpectedly. From the promise in her grip, the way she lays cool sticky fingers on his forehead, pushing back his sweaty hair, her mouth against the back of this neck making an aftershock roll through him, nearly as intense as the orgasm. 

Care. He doesn’t know the last time he was held with kindness, and he loathes himself, hates her for a moment for offering this false promise. But he shoves it away and chooses to sink against her, because she’s not the kind of person to do this either. He can feel it in the tentative grip, like she knows she needs to do something and is just powering through, hoping this is it, and her awkwardness overrides his loathing with the need to show her that it is necessary, that she’s doing fine. 

He covers her hand and leans into her, turning to watch Steve Rogers finish himself off like he's on stage, cock red and thick and straining, measured pumps and thumb over the head, working his balls, a serious look on his face and a steady rhythm like he could do that all day. It’s glorious, as awesome as seeing Steve in battle, and he aches to touch him but is too spent to do more than watch.

After Steve rides out his climax with a deep, gorgeous growl, Natasha whispers in Bruce’s ear, “I meant what I said.” 

He kisses her fingers, licks her taste off the pads.

She shudders, says, “Both of you,” like a promise, one she’s making to hold herself accountable. He chuckles weakly, and pulls her hand over his heart and pretends that it doesn’t mean anything else.


	5. Double Dutch

It's the heat that wakes her. The two of them are throwing off nuclear amounts of it, so she pushes up on one arm. Banner shifts a little, their legs still tangled together, and she gently extracts herself to sit up against the cool headboard. Rogers blinks up at her, drowsy bedroom eyes and she smirks, pushes the blond hair off his forehead. He leans forward, kisses her hip, skates fingers over her knee. 

Banner has an arm thrown over his head, stretching the skin thin over his ribs and she brushes the back of her knuckles along his side, then through the hair on his chest, a swell of affection for both of these men seizing at her.

Bruce catches her hand and presses his mouth to her wrist, tongue sweeping along her palm like he’s tasting her, then gently returning it to the place on his chest, all while Steve continues to stroke her leg, loosely circling her ankle bone.

She feels a little drunk - endorphins, spent adrenaline, the hazy afterglow of this strange sex. 

“Thirsty,” Steve says, like it's just occurred to him, and she scans the room for a sink. There's a bar in the living area. She gestures with her chin and he climbs out of the bed.

She watches his ass as he ambles to the bar, then looks down at Bruce who’s eyes are slitted like a cat as she pets his chest.

“Missing a show,” she murmurs. 

His chuckle rumbles against her palm and she nudges him with her knee.

He stretches again, blinks through his exhaustion and looks up at her. His eyes are very dark, expression open in a way that she hasn't expected. 

There's a question there, but he doesn't press, just reaches up to tuck her hair behind her ear, and it turns into a slow, delicate drawing of her down to meet his mouth.

This kiss is languorous, slow strokes of tongue as he controls the angle and pressure. She gives in to it, warmth spreading through her…

“Fuck,” she yelps, pushing down on Bruce’s shoulder to still his startle, then turns to glare at Steve. He passes them chilled glass bottles of water and bends to kiss the strip of skin on her back where he’d pressed the cold container.

The water tastes so good that she finishes the bottle in a few long swallows and hands it back to Steve, who sets it back on the floor and comes back up with the ribbon of condoms.

Heat flares, low in her belly, tight in her sex. Bruce sets his water on the other nightstand, sits up, and she's bracketed between them.

He puts his hand on her thigh and kisses her neck with lips chilled from water, heating fast, and Steve leans in to kiss her mouth, fingers delicate on her jaw.

“Can we...” Steve murmurs against her mouth, Bruce stroking the skin over her sternum and drawing patterns over her belly as he kisses her neck, her shoulders, stubble and that mobile mouth dragging down her spine. “I don’t want to presume, but I’d really like to feel you…” Pink steals across his cheeks, charming her in spite of herself. She’s slick, and wet, feels open and ready, and she’s surprised to find herself up on her knees, balancing half on Steve’s lap as Bruce drags his fingers along her cunt from behind. Her head falls back and he catches her, pressing her between his body and Steve’s so she’s riding Steve’s thigh, can feel him hardening against her hip, Bruce’s erection grazing her ass.

Okay, she thinks, want flashing through her, bright and seductive. Yes.

~*~

“Permutations,” she says to Steve, well, to both of them, maybe even to herself, as he draws his fingers through her wetness and brings them up to circle her nipples, “if we’re going to talk actual penetration.” 

Bruce starts to laugh so hard at that point that she elbows back to catch him in the ribs. He does something to her that has her gasping and clutching at Steve, the nipple in his fingers tightening down, so he rolls it a little harder in response. And oh. Yes. She’s very, very beautiful like that, flushed and panting. And so is Banner, mouth smug and yearning, high color, disastrous tangle of hair, nosing along her neck and his thumb along Steve’s jaw. Steve’s really enjoying the learning opportunities here.

He’s putting a lot of theory into practice right now, finding that in sex with strangers, with these comrades and teammates, one has to be willing to look at the mission objectives rather than the tactical battle plans, to be able and willing to switch positions quickly.

“Permutation one,” she says, “we both fuck you. “ She looks over her shoulder to raise an eyebrow at Bruce. 

“In theory, maybe,” he says.

She nods. “Permutation two, we both fuck him.” Bruce raises an eyebrow back at her, and says, “Again, in theory. I...look, I’m not being prudish about this, but that’s maybe a lot.”

She cocks her head, smile playing over her lush, full mouth, and says. “Point. Perhaps worth working up to, though.”

“Crushing you both to death in the midst of a new experience is maybe not the adventure we’re looking for here. So yeah, I’d say some long term investment in preparation would be necessary. Not sure we have that kind of time...”

And if that isn’t distracting. The idea of doing to Banner what Romanoff had done to him, watching him thrust, and buck, squirm as Steve worked him open... 

But right now, Steve wants to be enveloped in tight, wet heat and he doesn’t care who makes that happen.

It’s time to take back the lead here, get his head back in the game. “Permutation three,” he prompts.

Natasha threads her fingers through Bruce’s, hand on Steve’s neck. 

“Complicated,” she says, her voice is low, throaty. “Being fucked by two men is an exercise in power. It’s giving up control. Letting other people shape the pace, the experience. Or it can be. It requires trust.”

She’s doing that thing again, Steve realizes, guiding them through a concept, playing on their preconceived notions. Knowing the outcome and tilting them towards it like coaxing a marble through a maze.

“I’ve trusted you with my body today,” she says to Steve, and leans in, kisses him, strokes into his mouth, tongue cool from the water. “That trust was well-served.” 

She reaches back to thread her fingers through Bruce’s hair. “I...trusted your control, when you came back.” He kisses her as she turns towards him, and Steve can sense the apologies passing between them.

“I want this,” she says. “To be held between the two of you. Filled. Fucked. Opened up. Caught between safety and risk.”

Steve feels himself whimper as she takes his cock in her hand. He’s never heard anyone talk about sex like this. Bruce is similarly affected, breath shallow and color high. For all her talk of ceding control, she has them absolutely within her grasp.

~*~

He’s not sure he’s ever wanted something like he wants this, at least not in a sexual sense. Natasha has spun these webs of possibilities, and it’s impossible to push them out of his head. Fucking open Captain America, which seems a lot less illicit than it might have two hours ago, being fucked by him, and those both leave him sweaty and panting, a little uncomfortable but a lot turned on, and then there’s Natasha.

Warm, beautiful, intense. Soft and hard and bruised and he can’t stop touching her. Is afraid if he stops touching either of them, they’ll disappear.

Bruce knows his life and his luck well enough to know that pushing past his discomfort is the only solution here, because to give in would be to rob himself of this. And he may never get another chance. To slide against this much skin, to kiss, and touch, and hold, and fuck. To celebrate narrowly averted disaster.

Natasha reaches to the side table for the lube and passes him a condom. She’s working Rogers with this long, slow stroke, thumb rolling over the tip of his cock, and her hips are also rolling a little with the motion. They don’t negotiate for position, they follow her silent lead.

He’d watched her earlier, as she’d made Steve ready, fingers slick and sure. He’s good with his hands, and can make this good for her. A spasm rolls through his balls, shocks in his spine that in minutes he will be seated inside her, hot and tight and separated by a hair’s breadth from Steve’s cock deep in her cunt. That she’s trusting him with this.

It’s pornographic. It’s hypnotic. It’s enough to make his eyes water a little. He’s not going to disappoint either of them, he will not get lost in his fear, he will keep taking what he can get before anyone decides that he doesn’t belong there.

Bruce curls a hand into her thick red hair, breathes in sex and sweat, the lingering gun powder residue and the glorious scent that is these two people aching to be fucked. He wants to devour them; he wants to give them everything he has. 

~*~

Banner bites down on her neck, gentle like a cat settling in, settling her. Rogers tightens his possessive grip on them both.

This is exhilarating. Terrifying. Promises made good as she writhes between them, mouths and hands everywhere. They don't need her direction but they follow her lead, and this is a different kind of reverence from before; it's paying homage. To whatever this exercise has become. 

Steve’s mouth is sweet, one big palm cupping her skull, nimble fingers rubbing over the lips of her sex as she straddles him. Bruce works her open from behind, fingers slick and gentle and confident, so careful as he murmurs in her ear, against her skin. She arches her back, bears down against the intrusion and gasps at the pressure. She takes it, she asks for more. His fingers stretch and ease her. 

Her fingers flex against his forearm, and she pants, moans, says _yes_ , and _please_ and finally, "Now, oh god, now."

He's so thick, the blunt head of his cock against her ass, his heat tempered by the sheath of latex, and she pushes back, relaxing as best she can, but she's strung tight. The slow, intense pressure as he works his length into her is so much, too much, and not nearly enough. She digs her nails into Steve’s chest and grabs his hand, guiding him to where she needs the friction on her clit and a small shudder runs through her, enough for her to relax into the feel of the cock sliding into her ass. Bruce tilts her jaw, kissing her as deeply and warmly as before and the rest of the tension seeps out.

"You okay?" He asks, and it's such a loaded question. She's trembling with the intensity, the anticipation, the edge of fear and the hungry reality of her need, but she knows he needs a real answer so she kisses him again, tightens internal muscles, and he gasps. 

Steve sits up so she can find the right angle. Taking his cock in her hand, the condom shiny with lube, she rises up and sinks slowly down on him. 

His square blunt fingers are on the side of her neck, thumb behind her ear, mouth sweeping her cheek, her forehead, her lips. Bruce has pressed his palm flat against her lower belly over her pubic bone, his other hand cupping her breast. She might drown in it, this fullness, this starburst bright feeling of connection and lust. She rocks between them, takes a deep breath, letting them stretch her, letting them feel this, and then, when she can’t take it anymore, whispers, "Please. Fuck me..."

And they do.

She is caught between them, held as they find a rhythm that works, a push pull thrust and she finds her own rhythm within it, all three of them building and building, teamwork and friction and pleasure that's so gorgeously maddening, like reaching for something she can't quite see. Steve meets her thrusts with a groan, and Bruce trembles behind her.

He has been so good, so careful and she wants to take that pressure from him, an unencumbered release, and she squeezes her internal muscles as she fucks him. He gasps, withdraws just a little and she begs him to stay.

Steve is keening, hips rolling against her, grinding, deep inside her, balls soaked with lube and her wetness. He’s spread wide to accommodate them, and she can feel the stretch in her hip-flexors, her cunt, her ass, all sensation and nerve, so much. Too much, in the best way. 

Sweat rolls into her eyes, breathing heavy and erratic. She's so close, over-stimulated and making noises in her throat she barely recognizes as her own.

Bruce tightens his hold on her, and her fingers tangle with both of theirs against her belly, slipping down further together. She presses them against her pubic bone and works herself with her free hand. Her thighs are trembling, and she's so wet from the lube and her own slickness that she's rougher than normal and then she gets the friction right as Bruce rolls his hips, thrusting back in, grinding against her, and she can practically feel it in her lungs as Steve gives an answering thrust, hitting that perfect spot. Tears are coursing down her face as she arcs and bucks and comes like a motherfucking train.

Steve stutters with the pressure, the rippling tightness of her orgasm and she reaches between them, rolling and squeezing his balls and god bless 25 year old super soldiers for their constitution. He speeds up as Bruce slows down, seated hot and thick within her, keeping her steady as Steve holds onto Bruce’s shoulder so that he can fuck up into her, fast and hard, losing the rhythm as he gets closer, huffing and begging, beautiful as all hell, breathing out, “Oh god, oh god,” as he swells inside her, shouts, finds release. 

She grabs his face, kissing him through the aftershocks as Bruce rolls his hips against her, all controlled power and need.

She can feel the tremors against her back as he clings to control, and she tilts forward as his thrusts slow, curling over her belly, balanced on Steve’s chest. He's so beautifully, agonizingly slow that she wonders if he's trying to kill her, but he’s steadily hitting a spot that's giving her exquisite pleasure and a little pain that just heightens the whole thing. 

Her arms shake now too, another orgasm building, and then Steve is sliding out of her, turning on his back under them, strong hands wrapping around Bruce's hip. Then his tongue is stroking along her lips, against Bruce’s balls and she whimpers as Bruce spasms at the contact. Steve puts his mouth on her cunt, tongue thrusting inside her and she is so sensitive that she sobs. 

Bruce speeds up, more vigorous but still controlled, and it hurts in the best way possible as she squeezes, contracts, urging him on, “More,” she gasps, “more” and he gives her more, grinding into her just as Steve sucks her clit into his mouth and she’s coming again in a way that she barely recognizes as orgasm, her whole body flying apart, and finally, finally Bruce comes too with a noise like he’s dying of pleasure. 

She can feel it, every nerve in her body so attuned to him that she claws back at his neck, wanting to rake her nails against his skin, draw blood, mark him. He shies away, pulling out so abruptly that she topples over, caught by surprise and punching Steve in the stomach as she overbalances. 

Steve steadies her, wrapping her up in his arms while she tries to catch her breath, curling around herself, so suddenly empty that she’s trembling all over. Her face is wet and messy with sweat and tears. The bed shifts as Bruce gets up and she wants to call him back but she can’t voluntarily move. Can’t form words. 

She fades in and out for a bit, resurfacing to feel Steve curved around her, fingers brushing her hair off her face, his other hand on her belly.

The bed dips again.

She opens her eyes and Bruce looks so gloriously fucked, debauched. There are suckled bruises on his neck and chest, red marks and fingerprints, and she realizes with his downcast gaze that he's been pushed to his literal limits.

His mouth kills her, soft and pulled down. He has a bar towel in his hand, and she rolls over, head pillowed on Steve's abs. Bruce puts one knee on the bed and runs the cloth over her body, between her legs, down her thighs and over her feet and drops it on the bedside table when she opens her arms to him.

He shakes his head, but she catches his hand and tugs.

"Radiation," he says softly when he finally gives in, curling to lay his head on her hip. Steve cards his fingers through Bruce's matted curls. "My blood...I'm dangerous." And he starts to laugh then.

"My god, I can't even..." 

"It's fine," she says, "you're good. So good."


	6. Hopscotch

Rogers is passed out on his stomach, sleeping the sleep of the damned. Banner sits in the silk chair with his head back, glazed and stupefied.

Natasha sees them spent and still, and remembers them in the fight. It layers over in her mind: Steve lobbing her into the air off his shield, those same arms wedged under the pillow he’s buried his face in. Bruce’s knuckles stack delicately where his open hand rests on the arm of the chair, that same fist that had been the leading edge of his transformation.

She stiffens her legs against the shake of exhaustion and heads to the bathroom. Rogers snuffles into the pillow. Banner still looks stoned.

She's stayed for weeks in safe houses smaller than this shower, with its marble tiling and ledge to sit on, multiple shower heads in the walls and ceiling. A near perfect mimicry of natural light that makes the whole thing feel even more decadent.

She could enjoy this decadence by herself - she aches, in good ways and bad, from battle and from pleasure. Stand under the water to work out the knots, soothe her fading bruises and strains, steal that plush bathrobe and go check on Clint. 

It's what she should do.

Instead, she turns on the water and goes back into the bedroom, shakes Bruce's shoulder. 

"C'mon doc, got a surprise for you."

She hauls him, compliant, out of the chair and gently shoves him in the direction of the shower, then turns to Steve.

She places her hand on his back and croons his name. He moans and burrows back into the pillow. She's tempted to slap him on the ass because it's right fucking there. Instead, she calls his name again and tells him to join them in the shower. He rolls his head to face her, eyebrows raised like he’s trying to lever his lids up, but only one cracks open.

Back in the bathroom, Banner stands with his jaw hanging open. "Fuck me," he says. 

She starts to laugh then, and she's kept it together so well during these utterly batshit insane past few days - one long day if she's honest - and following that up with this intense bout of sex had not been on the agenda. Clint is alive and whole, or at least healing, but Phil is not, and there is alien life, and…

She's not a goddamned soldier, she's a spy and she's giving away her secrets, to Rogers, to this man in front of her gaping at a shower.

He turns at the noise, and her face contorts with even more emotion she did _not_ call up on purpose, hot ugly tears ambushing her amid her laughter and she swallows them back, swallows it all back even as he takes her hand gently and steers her toward the water. He angles and adjusts the spigots so hot water runs over her body, peppering her skin, and she feels the tears and snot drip off her face because they're all alive. Almost.

She can feel a gentle hand on her waist, lips on her shoulder, like he doesn't want to leave her be, but doesn't want to intrude and it's more intimate than him fucking her brains out, than any of the things they'd just spent hours doing. All of those boundaries crossed and she wonders that this is who she is. Undone by this gentle, tentative support from a man she'd forced out of hiding, who's saved her and threatened her, surprised her and sated her.

She leans back into Bruce's touch, and he wraps an arm around her waist and just holds her steady until the water has washed her clean.

She turns in his arms and sees Steve open the door and take in the sumptuous bathroom, puzzled for a moment until he says, “Let me guess, this isn’t actually a fancy communal shower. This whole room is meant for one person.”

“It’s communal now.” Natasha shrugs and rinses her face under the large shower head that creates a couple square feet of gentle rainfall. Bruce steps back with a lingering touch on her shoulder, and calls up the interactive menu on a glass plate screen next to a niche offering a variety of shampoos and gels.

Steve steps in.

~*~

Banner presses a button and strange blue light pours through the water. 

“Okay, not that one,” he presses the panel again and little pinpricks of light rush through the walls. “Why does anyone want that?”

Finally, he finds a setting he likes that alters the pattern of the overhead shower to mimic natural rain in fits and starts while the other shower heads behave more like normal bathing apparatus. Then he touches something else and the shower transforms again, wall lights dimming, and the overheads warm and shimmering in pinpoints like stars at night, soft lights near the floor glowing up like the moon reflecting on a river.

Steve tilts his face up, disoriented. There were nights like this in France, not peaceful so much, but open, the city lights so far in the distance that the sky looked endless. Today he watched aliens pour out of the sky, roaring across the city he was born in, and he doesn’t simply feel out of time but unreal. Unmoored.

Banner’s moved on to opening bottles. Steve can hear the clink and pop of containers, smell flower and fruit and something musky. 

“Gotta be shampoo over there,” Romanoff says. “My hair is...something.”

Steve stays still and watches the water. His chest is catching, but he keeps breathing through it, finally closes his eyes and steps under the spray.

When he opens his eyes, Banner has sat down on the ledge in the wall, head leaning against it, eyes half-lidded. Weary. Romanoff is scrubbing her hair like it's a job, rinsing it, the water and soap sliding over her body. It feels like a more innocent pleasure to watch. Her focus, that serious look on her face, is so different from the gasping intensity of her orgasm, the sloe-eyed seduction, the blankness she wore earlier, prior to battle; different too from that warm, devilish smirk that had accompanied her original lewd suggestion.

She combs conditioner through her hair with her fingers, and then nudges at the body washes looking for one she likes.

“Bruce,” she says sharply, and Steve realizes that Banner has slid from casual voyeurism all the way into nodding off. His eyes blink open quickly, and he pushes himself to stand, but she waves him back down and then steps between his knees with a bottle in her hand.

“Stay,” she says, tilting one of the shower heads down so he can wet his hair. He reaches for the bottle, but she’s already working a dollop of it in her palms, so instead he leans into her touch and lets her wash his hair, and Steve is struck again by the tenderness passing between them. Something delicate for two people who live at the opposite end from gentle.

Banner tilts his head back, rinsing out the shampoo, looking up at Natasha. She brushes the water off of his face with one hand, holding the other out to Steve as she calls his name.

Steve comes forward, stepping out of the rain, stepping back into the present.

~*~

“Gotta be washcloths somewhere,” Steve says, but Bruce is damned if he can see any.

Natasha takes something off a ledge that looks like a piece of modern art and holds it under the spray, squeezing it finally. Ah ha.

She hands it to Bruce, tilting her head at Steve, who’s still looking in dramatically lit niches.

“Turn around and pick your poison,” Bruce says to him, “I’ll wash your back.”

Steve chooses one that smells like lavender and honey, and it’s Natasha’s turn to sit on the ledge of sleepiness. She fits herself into the corner, pulling up her legs and watching them.

Steve bends down his head, and Bruce rubs the bubbly sponge over his broad shoulders. Steve sounds a little choked when he says, “Harder.” Pauses, follows it up with, “Please.”

Bruce gets that. Scrubbing clean. Wanting to reset. He works the sponge over Steve’s back and arms, his waist and legs. That solid, heavy chest and surprisingly knobby knees, and it’s both sexual and not, driven in part by Natasha’s cattish smile, but also by the feeling of care that’s overtaken him, wanting to offer something to Steve. Despite the youthful features, Steve doesn't seem young. Ageless, maybe, outside of time, and the reverence stealing through Bruce is something akin to awe, tempered by the warm humanity Bruce now knows is beneath the iconography. His fluidity in navigating battle, loss, sex, and death and...peace as they all struggle to find their way through to it.

Steve’s skin is pinking under the scrubbing and Bruce doesn't want to use the abrasive sponge on his cock, so he soaps his hands and is careful, almost clinical as he cleans the shaft, the scrotum. Steve is half-erect with the motion but just shrugs at Bruce like it doesn't really mean much.

It doesn't, weirdly. The intimacy is simply standing here, skin to wet naked skin with Natasha's fond amused gaze on them and exhaustion seeping from every pore. It is in the weary acceptance of each other and the extraordinary events of the past few days. His hand wrapped around another man’s dick is nothing compared to being in a room full of people who look at him as human, even though they all know he isn’t really anymore. To being anywhere at all where he can be both human and not.

Steve puts his hand on Bruce's neck and kisses him again, nearly chaste this time, full of warm sincerity. “Thanks, Doc,” he says and turns into the spray to rinse off.

Bruce is so tired now he can barely stand up as he scrubs and rinses himself down, and then feels Natasha pressed against his back. 

“This shower is made for fucking,” she says low, just for him, and there's such a warm sense of amusement in her voice. A private joke.

“I hope it serves him well,” Bruce murmurs back and she presses her lips to his shoulder blades and walks out of the shower.

He wipes the water from his face, pretending that her absence doesn't leave him a little hollow.

~*~

There are only two bathrobes in the closet. Natasha takes one, then offers Bruce the other as he dries himself off, wrapping the towel around his hips and hopping to get the water out of his ear.

“Nah,” he says, waves her off. “My clothes are okay. I’ll leave it for Steve.”

She can’t fathom putting her uniform back on right now, so her choice is to wander around this empty tower in a too big bathrobe with a giant S embroidered on it.

“I need to call in.”

There’s a glass tray with a Mason-Pearson hairbrush, a tortoiseshell wide-tooth comb, and a bristle shaving brush so soft that she strokes it over her cheekbone. Bruce quirks up his mouth at that, rubbing a hand down his stubbly face. 

“I should shave.”

She holds up an ivory handled safety razor. Bruce shakes his head, chuckling. “I’m so tired I’d probably cut my throat. It’ll keep.”

“I’ve got steady hands.” She taps the edge of the razor on the glass case. “I could do it for you.”

He swallows, holds her gaze. “It’s okay,” he says.

She tilts her jaw. Pretends that she doesn’t like the idea. There are dark circles under his eyes, and his skin is a little grey. He’s clean, his hair curling in a riotous halo as he scrubs at it with the towel. She thinks of the way he’d leaned into her hands as she’d scratched her nails along his scalp, lathering his hair.

“Maybe later,” he says, in a way that means someday, and maybe and really just never.

She wonders what the hell Steve is still doing in the shower.

She really does need to call in. Hasn’t even checked her phone in hours. They’ve been given a reprieve - the chaos of the battle, New York still quarantined - but Fury is going to want their status. Particularly now that Phil...

She drops the razor and picks up the hairbrush, starts pulling it through her hair, harder than necessary, catching sight of Bruce wincing in the mirror.

“Do you want me to…? That looks like it hurts.”

Fuck this, she thinks. Fucking, and grooming rituals and trying to be civil and concerned and kind...and suddenly she doesn’t feel kind, just vicious and angry, and she wants to break this expensive fucking hairbrush against the marble vanity. Chuck it at Banner, throw it at Rogers. Throw a fit.

Banner puts his hand up, “Never mind,” he says, and goes into the bedroom.

Shit.

The shower door opens and Rogers snags one of the big white bath sheets, rubbing it over his shoulders and hair, running it between his legs and around his balls like he’s some sort of commercial for the superhuman Olympics, or maybe soft core pornography. At least he would be if his face weren’t soft and drawn, exhaustion eating away at him as well.

He sees her at the vanity and his mouth tightens, eyes darkening, and she can’t. It’s too much. She carefully sets the brush down and heads into the bedroom.

~*~

Banner is buttoning his pants and searching around for a shirt while Romanoff sits primly on one of the couches in the entertainment area, talking softly into her phone. She’s still in the bathrobe.

Her hair curls around her face and she looks simultaneously as old and as young as Steve feels. Her expression is completely flat as she quietly talks to Fury, or Assistant Director Hill, or whomever it is she reports to.

Oh.

Who she reports to _now_.

Steve sinks back down into the arm chair by the bed, and watches him hunt for his shirt, flipping the soiled bedding back and forth and finally stripping the coverlet off and bundling it up onto the floor, looking at Steve who nods.

“Sorry, Stark,” he says, “Your inaugural guests kind of ruined your nice things.”

The exposed sheets are pale gray, heavier and finer than anything Steve has slept on before. Suddenly all he wants to do is crawl in between those cool sheets and close his eyes.

He hasn’t really had the urge to sleep since he woke up from the ice. His body eventually tires, and he forces himself to rest, but that sleepy sated feeling? He’s not sure he’s had that in a nearly a century, but now it’s weighing his body, leaving him sluggish.

He rests his elbows on his knees, head hanging down, and spies Banner’s shirt under the bed. He fishes it out.

Banner has paused in his search, Romanoff’s black underwear in his hand, shaking his head. He places them on top of the pile of her uniform and equipment, takes the shirt from Steve, and puts it on.

The clothes are clean and untattered, but they don’t really fit him, and Steve winces. He doesn’t like looking at Bruce, knowing what he’s capable of and what he chooses to do with that, and see him accept such a bare minimum of care.

Steve scrubs at his eyes. He’s sentimental when he’s tired, and wishes kind of desperately that he could still get tipsy. Just a little. Take the edge off and let himself have a good cry into his beer. Live his legacy as an Irish son of Brooklyn.

When he looks back up Romanoff is off the phone, head cocked, staring at him.

Banner makes a point on the triangle, glancing between Romanoff and Steve, gauging the room, and he feels a wash of loneliness as their study continues. He doesn’t think they even see it...or maybe they do. They’ve both proved uncommonly perceptive about action and reaction. Maybe a slightly less though, about emotion. That guts him a little, so much potential for missed opportunity.

This time their looks are clearly about him, panicky and worried. Which is such utter bullshit, it’s his job to worry about them, not the other way around.

Steve sits up straight, arms akimbo, glaring back at them.

“What, you’ve never seen an Irish kid get sappy? Is the future really that...removed? You don’t get sentimental at the end of a big day, a bunch of other big things?”

Something about that gets Romanoff’s mouth working, and he knows dirty thoughts when he sees them.

“Ha, ha,” he says, and she bites her lip.

“Not cold, distant maybe.” And of course it’s Bruce who shakes his head against the easy quip, wanting the future to be good for Steve, even though they all maybe know it’s a lie. “And we might be shitty role models for emotional health…Deflecting, hiding behind dick jokes.”

“Not my fault they’re big enough to hide behind,” Romanoff bites out, but there’s wry humor to it.

“I’m not actually a Ralph Bellamy type, you know. I’ve made my fair share of raunchy jokes.”

“No Ralph Bellamy, huh? So does that make you Cary Grant or Rosalind Russell?” Romanoff references _His Girl Friday_ , barely hanging on to serious now.

“Oh no, you’re definitely Cary Grant,” Banner points to Romanoff, “Charming words and gentle persuasion.” 

She starts to laugh, “That makes you the damsel in distress.”

He shakes his head, playing with the cuff of his shirt like he’s debating whether to button or roll. “You heard Steve; he’s not the patsy, which makes him Russell.”

“Shrewder than he looks,” She nods, “Does that make you Bellamy?”

“Nah,” Bruce says, “I’m that guy that hides in the desk, the one everyone’s chasing.”

“Ouch,” Natasha says, but her gaze is sharp.

Bruce shrugs all _fait accompli_.

Romanoff takes a deep breath and says, “I need to check in with Barton,” but she looks between them again like she searching for something, a reason or an excuse. Steve doesn’t know her very well, but he suspects that she’d reject the latter if she found it. “I’ll need to fill him in, too.”

“‘Course,” Banner says, and Steve nods.

“It looks like we’re here for a few days.” Romanoff stares at where she plucks at the robe covering her knee, still damp and disheveled but already slipping back into professionalism. “The city is still under lockdown. Local emergency services are gonna have to handle triage and such. They don’t want to bring the helicarrier over the city yet until they can assess any potential radiation issues, make sure the threat is neutralized.

Steve can’t help saying to Bruce, “You should get some better pants,” but it comes out sounding like an order instead of concern.

~*~

Steve is still pushing the issue of the clothes, and Bruce thinks that he’s just so tired his brain is looping, unable to break the circle and move to a new topic. He tries to help. “What about you? I can’t see you wanting to put that uniform back on right away…”

“Stark probably has clothes…” To his credit he doesn’t need to see Natasha’s incredulous look at his towel-wrapped backside to figure out, “...okay maybe not.”

“Steve, it doesn’t matter right now. You need to sleep. I need to sleep.”

“You could stay here?”

“I don’t sleep around people,” Bruce shrugs. “Not...well, I just don’t.”

Natasha has her uniform and boots in her arms. She looks defiant, and a little lost, even as she nods understanding.

It feels so strange to simply disperse, to walk out of this room like nothing happened. But what is there to say?

Steve takes that in, rubbing his jaw. Even his stubble glints gold. “Well, you’re welcome back,” he says finally, eyes swinging to them both. “If you just want some company.”

Bruce says, “Thank you,” and means it. Natasha just nods again. They leave in silence.


	7. Pick-Up Game

“Nice robe,” Clint says. He has somehow acquired a six-pack of beer, but he’s clearly just been nursing the first one for awhile, leaned up against the headboard of the bed. She tilts the bottle to look at it, decides she doesn’t care.

She sits on the opposite end of the bed, cross-legged. The robe is so oversized on her it doesn’t gape.

The quarters Stark had given him are smaller than Steve’s palatial suite, but still luxurious. Like a boutique hotel, dark wood, good light, a separate bathroom, leather couch in the corner with a television and a coffee table covered in glossy art books. There’s an honest to god record player in the corner, and an artful collection of vinyl leaning against the wall next to it.

“This place,” he says. “This fucking place. This fucking world.”

“You call home?” 

He lifts a shoulder.

“Clint.”

“I called in. Said I was okay. I just can’t...I need to know I’m me first, Nat. For a little while longer. I can’t take the chance, I…”

She thinks she gets it, the doubts. But he’s Barton through and through. She’d know him anywhere, in the dark with her eyes closed, with every cell of her body. Her partner. Friend. Family, when she allows herself the indulgence of that idea.

She needs to call Laura before they make any decisions.

When he’d been under Loki’s control, he’d felt...wrong. Like a shirt that was too small under the armpits, itchy and irregular. She hadn’t needed the surreal blue of his eyes to clue her in to his fundamental absence.

“Thor says you’re fine. He can’t access you again, not randomly.”

“Yeah, well,” Clint purses his mouth, “I’m gonna have to decide whether or not I’m gonna take a guy in a fucking cape with a magic hammer at his word, about anything, much less about his asshole brother mind-fucking me. If you don’t mind.”

She sighs. He’s being a dick. Maybe he's earned the right to be. Fury had given her the estimated number of dead on the carrier, in Germany, in the attacks. It is not a number she’s going to share with Clint.

He looks at her again, and raises an eyebrow. “Where you been?”

She shrugs, “Burning off some post-battle adrenaline.”

“That’s what they’re calling it?”

She gives him a slow blink. “I could stay,” she says. “We could drink beer, watch shitty tv, forget…” the word itself is a mistake. She’s rarely so careless even with Clint but her mind feels slurry and sluggish with fatigue, and his expression hardens.

“I’m good,” he says, deliberate and locked down again. “Go on, get some sleep.”

He doesn’t mean it as a personal attack, isn’t throwing her out, but she rolls off the bed promptly in part to conceal the sting in her eyes. She takes two beers out of the six pack and leaves them on the desk, taking the remaining three with her.

She still doesn’t have anywhere to go.

~*~

Stark hands her a pile of clothes with only a cursory raised eyebrow at the bathrobe and the beers. “You staying then?” 

“For tonight, maybe tomorrow. If that's alright.”

He flicks his hand at her with a dismissive gesture which would be rude from someone else. From Tony Stark it's kind of nice. Uncomplicated.

So uncomplicated that she's driven to ask, “Can I do anything? Do you need anything?”

Cocks his head, thinking. She’s aware she’s padding around the tower in guest slippers and a fuzzy bathrobe, but he doesn't laugh at her, he knows what she can do. “Maybe later.”

Of all of them except Clint, she and Stark have spent the most time together. She can tell he’s a little off, but then who the fuck isn’t? 

“You can ask, Stark,” she says, “I’ll help.”

He gives her a little salute, and says, “Agent.” Points her back to the elevator.

“JARVIS,” she says when the doors close, “where can I sleep?” It’s such a funny question, and as he offers her the option of two rooms that Stark has okayed for her use, she thinks of Steve and his forlorn expression, Bruce and the question he’d left hanging as they parted at the elevator.

She takes a deep breath. “JARVIS, I changed my mind. Can you tell me where Doctor Banner is?”

JARVIS guides her to Bruce’s suite with a fair amount of reserve. Apparently Banner is also allowed some privacy controls. Save the world with him, but Stark is still a little pissy about SHIELD. Or maybe just about her. She’s suddenly shy, knocking on the door. 

Bruce answers, a little blurry, but he clearly hadn’t been in bed. He’s still dressed.

She holds up the beer, gestures at the hallway. Her other arm is curved around her growing pile of clothes.

“Maybe it’s not sleeping,” she says in greeting. “Maybe we just keep watch for each other.”

There’s a long beat that stretches into a long minute and he doesn’t invite her in, just looks at her like he’s making up his mind, then finally he nods.

“Okay,” he says, taking the beer from her and following her to Steve’s suite.

The door opens on their knock but the man himself is sprawled under the gray sheets, muscles bunching along his broad back as he digs into the pillows. He murmurs a rough greeting.

Natasha curls back into one corner of the couch, and Bruce takes the other end. Their feet tangle, and she passes him a beer, finds the remote on the table, and flips through to Food Network, then to one of the classic movie channels. It’s showing _Laura_ , the old Gene Tierney movie about a woman who disappears, leaving murderous accusations in her wake. Bruce has seen this in bits and pieces all over the world - dubbed, subtitled, cut for commercials, grainy colorization. 

Natasha softly asks JARVIS to dim the overheads, so the only light is the ambient flicker from the television. Eventually, Steve mumbles sleepily for them to turn the sound up.

Her knuckles brush against Bruce’s when she sets down the remote. She doesn’t hold hands with anyone but Lila Barton; Cooper’s still the best lapful of warm and sleepy, but he’s too busy and too big to hold hands anymore.

Bruce shifts the remote, pushing it back against the cushion out of the way, and then their fingers are entwined. She doesn’t look at it too closely.

None of them really sleep for long, but they close their eyes in fits and starts, cycles of rest, and when Bruce wakes up a few hours later, Natasha’s long legs are tangled with his, hot and a little sticky, and Steve has hijacked blankets from somewhere. One of them is draped half over Bruce, and half over Natasha, the other covering Steve’s hips as he sprawls on the rug in front of the television, head between two pillows in front of the couch.

~*~

It's technically true that Natasha and Clint don't have orders. New York may still be a no-fly zone, but it was strongly suggested that they report in to SHIELD’s mobile HQ. With Clint holed up like an injured animal, she's disinclined to take that hint until it’s put in writing and put in her hand. Which brings them all to Stark’s floor this morning to share intel and stale donuts commandeered from SI’s accounting department.

The irony is that at a time when it seems that the suit should be the hero, it’s actually Stark’s position as financier and philanthropist, not to mention engineer, that’s greasing the wheels and facilitating the clean up, including using the Avengers to best effect. Pepper is conferencing in on a holoscreen, looking even paler than Tony, but doing a quick and dirty training of Steve on how to use the databases of nonprofits, emergency responders, clinics, equipment and food banks to help distribute resources and coordinate volunteer efforts.

Steve looks like he might just orgasm from the advances in logistics, if there weren’t lives on the line. He starts deploying them with a nod of his head like he did out in the street the day before. Stark at the Tower to work with Pepper on inter-agency coordination, Thor guarding his brother, Bruce assisting with the medical relief.

Bruce nudges his nose with the back of a knuckle to push up glasses that are MIA.

Clint mutters only for her ear, “What’ll you bet we get the heavy lifting?”

She’s absurdly glad that he’s even talking to her, but pitches her voice to match his weary monotone. “We’re usually a lot better at breaking stuff than fixing it.”

The street is quiet, since the NYPD are keeping the bridges and tunnels one-way valves out of the city except for emergency vehicles, and the MTA is only running diesel locomotives to check and repair the subway routes. The four of them are down here to help assess and tag both casualties and alien tech in the remaining ruin inside the SHIELD quarantine zone.

She and Clint are in ill-fitting civilian wear, trying to stay as anonymous as they can. Clint’s straining one of Stark’s black Henleys at the seams, but has his own tactical pants. She’s wearing a Bruce Springsteen tour shirt and jeans that are tight in the ass and too long everywhere else, over silk underwear worth half of her weekly paycheck. Undoubtedly raided from Pepper’s closet, but ill-fitting enough on Natasha that she can blend into the crowd, and at least she’s got her own boots under the rolled up pant legs. Steve is back in most of his uniform, which is both a morale booster and makes him easy to spot even in the center of a knot of leaders and volunteers, getting the intel and doing his logistics thing.

Bruce just looks like any rumpled volunteer, hands in his pockets, head cocked, listening as Steve divvies them into teams. She thinks this is almost a normal day for him.

Steve climbs up on a busted taxi to pour inspiration and common sense through a megaphone, looking so much like his own parody that she almost laughs. Instead she thinks of how much more real he’d looked last night, stripped down in more ways than one, sardonic and weepy in an Egyptian cotton towel.

Clint heads off with a mainly Spanish-speaking crew, a soft rebuff that she tries to take gracefully, and Bruce goes to toil in one of the medical stations. Natasha teams up with Steve.

They go block by block, tagging unstable structures and calling in medical emergencies to be evacuated, building a picture of what’s needed, directing people to shelters and where to get food and medicine. They work their way in loops anchored at their local base of operations, a boutique storefront on Broadway left miraculously undamaged. Steve is a stickler for everyone taking breaks to rehydrate, to treat any blisters or cuts. He’s accustomed to caring for soldiers on the move, and he does so even surrounded by luxury bath products.

Bruce shows up in the late afternoon, juggling a giant stack of paper cups and two big cardboard catering carafes of coffee. Natasha wants to kiss him. She gives him a tired closed-lipped smile instead, and heads out on another loop with Steve.

At least the weather is okay for it. Most people are just going to be inconvenienced, laying low in their apartments until the city gets up and running again. But not all. There are teams working on providing dry goods and food supplies in Manhattan to those in need, but not everyone will have access immediately. People will suffer. Some more than others.

There’s nothing she’s doing that other people couldn’t do just as well, if not better, including marking the places where there are bodies to be removed. There are fewer than if the Avengers hadn’t been there - even if the tactical nuclear strike had successfully beaten back the Chitauri it would still have been a worst case scenario with millions lost - but that doesn’t help the people caught in the crush of panic, trapped in rubble, hit by crossfire or cars or just...lost.

No battle is without casualties; Natasha isn’t a sentimentalist, but it’s never comfortable to see civilian losses. Some of those losses are undoubtedly the result of choices each of them made - a leap, a shot, a smash, a blast. She’d rather be the one spray painting the black casualty markers than leaving it to the makeshift emergency workers, the hollow-eyed volunteers. It’s a way to own her part in this. 

But it’s equally, unbearably frustrating that the person, the fucking god who spearheaded this disaster is placidly locked in the bottom of Stark’s tower, and that they’ll need to escort him to the SHIELD building sooner rather than later. That his consequences may be out of her control. For now she concentrates on what she can control. Rogers is a good partner, clever and able to visualize information, willing to shift tonnage and able to work smart.

Natasha’s shoulders and calves ache from climbing and hauling and carrying. It’s getting into evening when they come in from their last loop, and they won’t be able to do this work safely in the dark. Her skin is hot, too tight. She’s not used to feeling inadequate in the face of a problem, and it’s left her buzzy and agitated, in need of something to break.

Bruce hands her a cup of lukewarm coffee and sinks into the chair opposite, framed by pyramids of bath bombs. He looks up expectantly, but she doesn’t want to sit, so he busies himself with sugar, stirring his coffee with his finger.

He’s got this hard, anxious line around his mouth. She thinks his thoughts are probably following a similar pattern.

She tilts her head. He shakes his.

“C’mon, Banner, what is it?”

He sighs, reluctant. “It felt okay, yesterday, you know. Like I’d harnessed something, turned it to the good.”

Natasha steps closer to lean against the wall next to his chair.

“But I look around today, and…I can’t tell you how many limbs I bandaged, how many head injuries I had to send to the overflowing ER, how little help I actually was. I don’t even know if there’s any point, and I can see how much damage he...I did. There’s a whole building over on 43rd...” He hangs his head down.

It stings. If she’d figured out Loki’s game more quickly, if she’d kept him from riling up Banner, if she’d been less worried about getting Clint back, maybe they could have prevented some of this destruction. It’s such pointless speculation, but here in the dust and rubble and rose-scented bath bombs, it’s hard not to see the crush of damage, the fear in people’s eyes, the way the world has changed, and how inadequate they may be in the face of those changes.

“You can’t think that way,” she says, and he gives her such a flat _you are so full of bullshit_ look that her breath hitches on a harsh laugh.

The weight of it is too much. Suddenly, she just wants to be away from here, wants to remember the feeling of warmth, of control, of skin and safety. She wants to wipe away the loathing that shadows his face, bitter and wretched.

She feels desperate and reckless, loose limbed with it, wanting something to dig teeth and nails into. He looks like he feels the same. Like he wants to rake his nails along his skin and tear out chunks.

“Let’s go,” she says, before she can think too long on it. 

“Go?” He says, and it’s so soft. Like he can read her from there. This dark look in his eyes shifts slightly...and she realizes that for all of his soft words, his hiding from the world, it’s not because he’s risk averse. It’s that he’s so terribly tempted. He doesn’t trust himself.

She puts down her coffee and catches his eye, and he follows her out the door.

~*~

Her breasts strain against the binding t-shirt, her nose filled with the stink of sweat and concrete dust, the hallway shadowed but still thick with muggy late summer humidity and the cloying scent of bath bombs from the floor below, her pants shoved down her thighs and trapping her legs, and none of it matters.

His mouth is so hot, stubble scraping against her inner thighs, already raw, marks suckled into the join of her hip, and she’s shaking with it. She buries one hand in his hair, and fists the neck of his t-shirt with the other so she doesn’t claw at him. She whimpers and sees stars as she slams her head into the wall, spasming, fucking his face as she finishes.

He wipes his face while she wriggles the jeans back over her hips. He doesn’t get up, even when she rubs the back of her hand against his jaw. It’s prickly against the grain, soft in the other direction, and she relishes the scrape against her skin. He catches her fingers, bites down into the fleshy part of her palm, enough pressure so it zings through her.

He’s still on his knees, erection pressing against his zipper, but he doesn’t make a move to adjust himself, just looks up at her like he understands.

She doesn’t do this. Getting off in the twilight, in a battlefield, like going out for a smoke, a final break before that last push. But it all feels so fabricated, so desperate and sad and unreal, the broken pieces of city, the broken people they’ve seen. Natasha is an instigator. She finds cracks and makes them caverns. She gathers intel, forces hands, seduces and betrays.

She’s not the clean up crew. 

Yet she’s here. 

And her partner, the one who gives her context and clarity when she requires it, is silent, withdrawn, and she can’t ask him for anything. Has no right to demand it from him, and so instead she takes, and takes, pleasure and fear and something unnamed coiling through her as she cups her hand around the rough jaw of this man on his knees in front of her, seeking his own rough penance in the rubble of a city.


	8. Playing Catch

Dinner is quiet, reheated catering trays of meatballs and mac and cheese commandeered from the commissary, supplemented with a pantry raid in Stark’s penthouse. Bruce discusses better Loki containment options with Tony and Thor, while Clint looks away, and Natasha looks at him like someone’s carving out her heart.

Finally she turns back to them and snarls, “Figure it out,” like it’s just that simple. Tony riles. Thor sighs, and Bruce wonders if he’s the only one who can hear that it’s a plea.

He thinks maybe because he knows what she sounds like when she says please.

Clint gets up before the meal is done, heads to his room. Steve looks like he wants to follow him, but it’s actually Tony who says, “Leave it. He needs some space. Distance. No one likes to be manipulated. Takes a while to...get your footing.”

“My brother will not submit for long,” Thor says, “nor do I relish leaving his fate in the hands of Midgard. He has done you great wrongs, but ultimately, he is ours to punish.”

Natasha’s mouth flattens, but she doesn’t say anything and her expression quickly evens out. Cool, collected, seemingly unmoved. Bruce turns away from her, confirms that no one else caught the subtle shift, but then sees Steve frowning. Okay, he's not the only one.

“We need to make sure that if he decides to object to his current captivity, we’ve got something aside from a punchy green wall to contain him,” Stark agrees.

Now it’s Bruce’s turn to frown. “Let’s designate that to the last resort pile, please.” 

Stark shrugs.

Thor looks thoughtful, and Bruce says, “It’s a temporary solution at best, holding him here. Whatever we, or SHIELD, or the rest of humanity may want, he’s still effectively a god.”

He looks at Thor for confirmation, who nods.

“So we keep him in the chains we can forge,” Stark says, “for as long as it takes.”

Thor’s eyes narrow, and Bruce turns away. “Let’s hope his cage holds him.”

Steve visibly cringes. “Squabbling over Loki’s fate is all well and good, but we need to look at ways to get the infrastructure of the city back to functional. There are people out there who need food and water, shelter. There’s hundreds of tons of rubble to move, and we can help.”

“I’m doing what I can,” Stark says sharply.

“We all are,” Bruce says, wonders if it’s true. Natasha remains in the seat next to him, body taut and tight, but face serene. It’s desperately unsettling. He feels the other guy stir, alerted by the tension, and sniff the air like a dog. He breathes back out, cafeteria food and shower gel, the scent of her sharp sweat just a sense memory but lingering all the same.

“We’ll need you for this,” Stark says to Bruce.

“I’m here,” he says. 

Stark holds his gaze for a long time, then nods.

Stark and Thor leave not long after. 

As far as Bruce knows, Thor has spent his day facing off against his brother. Keeping watch. It sounds unbearably sad and frustrating. Bruce rubs his knuckles with his thumb, antsy, anxious, annoyed at the whole conversation. As if they all weren’t doing their best.

Bruce doesn’t actually give a shit about who punishes Loki. He’s worked out his personal issues with him. His anger now is further reaching. But he doesn’t want to give into it, to the consistency of those who can least afford suffering always falling prey. Of how little patience he has for the sort of games Loki was trying to pull, of how wretched it feels to have raw power you can’t control.

“Bruce.” Natasha’s voice is sharp. “Doctor Banner.” 

He turns and sees her flat expression locked in place, but a fork clenched tight in her fingers, a heartbeat away from becoming a weapon. Steve is all intent concern, but his shoulders are back, jaw set. Irritation flares along with understanding, Bruce’s lip curling. Are they this on edge, to think he’d…? Then he has a flash of Natasha on the helicarrier, trembling and determined and so fucking terrified, and he’s awash with shame.

He looks down, breathes through it - the annoyance at the hard doubt in Natasha’s tone, the reprimand in Steve’s ready stance. 

It doesn’t help, and Steve half stands, ready to block whoever and whatever, and then he hears Natasha’s breath hitch like a warning and it floods over him - the way she’d pulled his hair, the sound she’d made out there in the open, vulnerable and bare and so fucking beautiful that the risk of getting caught seemed so meaningless. He thinks of Steve’s mouth on his collarbone, the smoothness of his palms, and it calms him. That alone draws a mirthless laugh, but he doesn’t want to be an asshole. He thinks he _likes_ these people, damaged and fucked up as they are. He’s in good company here.

Bruce doesn’t think touching Natasha right now is a good idea, but he wants to give her a gesture of some sort.

He spreads his hands flat on the table so they can see them, and then says quietly, “I’m okay.”

She’s still clutching the fork. He puts on his best self-deprecating expression, and rubs his hand over his jaw. “I still need a shave...”

He glances at Steve, who gives him this faint, sad smile like they need to take what they can get it and relish it, even in small gestures. There’s something warming about Steve’s approval, even in this.

But he doesn’t really breathe until Natasha says, “Yeah, okay.” 

Not until she loosens her fingers and puts down the fork.

~*~

The hot damp towel softens the bristly hairs on Bruce’s face, wiping off the grime of the day along with any lingering traces of her scent.

At the dinner table, she’d seen him fight back against his own rage and frustration, had seen strained tendons in his neck and a look in his eyes that wasn’t human, and she’d wondered if she’d be fast enough now. If she’s gathered enough intel on the transformation to kill him before it takes him over.

Probably not. But she’d die trying, not crushed to death, helpless and quivering. That might be enough. Every touch now is an affirmation that the flesh under her hands belongs to the man and not the monster. His submission is a gesture, an apology, an act of fealty perhaps - to her, to Steve, to the others. She understands those sorts of gestures, subtle as they may be.

He's brought them back to his own suite this time.

Tony’s lodging Bruce in an atmosphere of warm woods and dark jewel toned colors, like a manor library before the books have been shelved. The bedroom is bigger than the space he’d been renting in Kolkata. Steve lounges on the bed and watches them, wearing a borrowed pair of sweatpants that are fine through the ass, but strain at the thighs and are a several inches too short. It’s not his uniform, so there’s that.

Natasha has stripped down to the borrowed black silk panties and a tank. Bruce’s torso is bare, his fingers flexing where he’s keeping them at his sides. Bruce is atoning. The muscles in his belly twitch like a hiccup. She runs the towel over the back of his neck, his chest and shoulders.

“Careful,” he says to her, unable to stop himself from offering a warning. “This is…”

“Steve,” she asks, “a little help?”

He rolls off the bed, and puts his warm, solid hand on Banner’s shoulder.

“No one’s gonna hurt you,” he says, and it should sound obvious or trite, but there’s that inexplicable kindness that kills her. Bruce settles.

She strokes his throat, his chest, registering the coiled tension and that he’s breathing in a pattern, eyes slitted, trying to manage it. She’d like to kiss away his fear, but she doesn’t have the right. And besides, it’d be like trying to kiss fire. The threat is real, she can hear the adrenaline-fueled blood beating in her ears.

He blinks open, green running through his gaze like marbles, cat eyes. Blinks again. It’s gone.

“Okay,” he says.

~*~

Steve brought the shaving kit down from his room. Bruce’s medicine cabinet had a good disposable razor and fancy shaving cream from a boutique men’s shop, but the point was the barbershop ritual. He recognizes something in Natasha’s motions, the precision and order. The care she is taking.

She swirls the brush in the soap, creating a thick lather, and moves the bristles in circles over Bruce’s strong jaw, the strained tendons of his neck, his cheeks and upper lip. His head is tilted back, and Steve supports him gently. She’s straddling one of Bruce’s legs, and she puts the brush down gently and pushes his curls off his forehead.

“This is a luxury.” She leans down to murmur into his ear, “Forty bucks for a straight razor shave in Midtown.”

There’s a curve to Bruce’s mouth that says he’s trying, and he draws his thumb along the bone of her hip, dragging down the edge of the black panties. Steve twitches a little at that, the sensuality of the gesture. The way tiny goosebumps break out over Natasha’s milk pale skin, the way Bruce’s thumb rests in that hollow. Steve is grateful for the stupid sweatpants. They let him feel a little more contained, his reaction to their touch a little more hidden. It had been complicated and unsettling the night before, to be the one so exposed in the midst of two people with such infinite control.

“Hold still,” she says to Bruce, and catches Steve’s eye. That blush he can feel stealing over his cheeks isn’t embarrassment. His gaze flicks between her nipples, hard under her thin shirt, to her hand on Bruce’s bare chest, his bared throat.

“Careful,” Steve echoes, and she nods.

She swirls the safety razor through warm water, and holds Bruce’s head behind the neck, strokes gently along his jaw. The sound of it grates at Steve, the scrape of blade against bristle hitting the nostalgia and pleasure centers simultaneously. She rinses the razor, and he swallows hard against the clink of metal against porcelain.

“Good?” she asks.

“Getting there,” Bruce breathes, but she’s also waiting for Steve, her eyes dark with understanding. 

“So good,” he says.

It is startlingly intimate, this action, the trust Bruce is placing in their hands, even as he struggles with it, tension tight along his shoulders and jaw, knuckles clenched. But she is careful, so very careful not to cut, to nick, to damage. To leave his face smooth, smelling of cool sweetness and expensive soap.

She gently wipes the rest of the shaving cream away. Steve cups his jaw.

“Perfect,” he says, leans down and rubs his own smooth cheek against Bruce’s. Natasha has her hands on his shoulders, and Bruce curves an arm around her waist, cups Steve’s skull. She sinks down into his lap, sitting across his thighs.

Steve turns his head and kisses her, slow, languorous and lovely. Bruce hums in his throat, twitches like he’s hardening under her, and she turns with a grin to kiss him, still stroking Steve’s neck.

Bruce wraps his hand around her thigh, and his touch is more feral than the night before. It’s been a long wearying day and they’ve pushed him tonight, he’s pushed himself as well. Pushing back against the chaos. Steve feels it too, stretching like a cat, angling his body like a tease.

When Romanoff slides off Banner’s lap and pushes his legs apart, Steve wraps an arm down around his torso, and rubs a warm circle over his sternum. He’s never really been with anyone like Bruce, all that hair soft on his chest, trailing along his belly, wiry and dark around his cock; all that lean muscle and bone, all that contrasting wariness, so tense until he gives over with his whole body.

Natasha kneels between his legs, complement and contrast: pale and curved, elegant limbs, firm flesh, lush, heartstopping mouth, and such perfect matched control in every line of her body, in the drift of her hands, the arrangement of her limbs.

Her knees are together as she sits on her heels. She’s unbuttoned Bruce’s pants, reached in to pull out his cock, and the sight of her pale fingers wrapped around it gets to Steve in a way it hadn’t the night before. She’s scrubbed off most of the spray paint, but flecks of stoplight colors, flecks of black remain in the grooves of her fingernails, telling of hours of climbing and working to put a city back together, and now that confident touch grips Bruce with surety. Steve watches her tell him without words that has him, he can put himself in her hands. He can trust her. At least with this.

“You can’t touch,” she says to Bruce, and it’s so seductive, that prim kindness. It rolls through Steve, through his balls, his belly, twinges in his ass. He thinks he’d do anything she asked in that voice, can feel its effect on the other man as he pulls in an unmeasured breath. “But you can tell me what you’d like. Whatever it is you’d like us to do.”

“I don’t know if I can,” Bruce says, but it’s almost guttural. Steve can hear the real desperation in his voice, and he cocks his head, wondering if she’s pushing too hard. 

“You can,” she promises. “Steve will help you.” 

His hand flexes, reaches up to cover Steve's where it rests over his heart. He grips Bruce’s wrist, solid reassurance, anticipation running through him.

~*~

Bruce has never been good with words, not like this. But he’s trying. 

“Tighter,” he says, and her grip flexes around the base of his shaft. Oh god. Her mouth is hot and wet, and the graze of her teeth against delicate flesh, the softness of her lips are devastatingly good. Steve holds him down against the chair, his own teeth against Bruce’s shoulder. 

He whimpers. Wants more. Her tongue presses along the underside of his shaft as she sucks gently for a moment, and then harder. He bucks up against her. She slides back, licks the tip, tightens the circle of her fingers again, then returns.

“Deeper,” he begs, and feels so beautifully fucking used even as his cock hits the back of her throat. He strains against Steve, at the sight of her, fingers spanning his pubic bone, digging into his hip, gagging on him. Steve is humming with pleasure at the sight, and Bruce has to beg her to stop finally, voice cracking because he's too close and they aren't using protection and he just can't take the risk.

“No more,” his eyes are closed, hands fisted. “I can’t take any more…”

“Who said this is for you?” she asks, amused, scratching her nails around his balls, down his thighs, with a doe-eyed glance up at Steve--all fake sweet seduction, but full of genuine pleasure. Her nipples are hard through the shirt, the thin skin along her chest as pink as her cheeks.

He ignores her words, although the idea makes him even more raw, needier. That this is a performance. They’d played this the night before, letting Steve call it like a battle, but this is different. This is Natasha playing them both, knowing Steve’s preferences, knowing that testing control is the key to Bruce, pushing him past the point of maintaining it; and he takes all of that until he lets go…asks for what he wants.

What he wants is to wind up these two people as tightly as they’ve wound him. He needs to give them something in return.

“What you did last night, to Steve...I want to feel that…see it...”

“Oh god,” Steve moans behind him and he knows he made the right choice as her pupils expand, and she runs her teeth over her bottom lip.

She strips off his pants, pulls his hips to the edge of the chair, kneels again when he's exposed. The angle is awkward, his thighs trembling, but she opens him delicately, gently, with slick careful fingers, as he tips his head back and takes it.

It's odd, and good, and Steve kisses him whenever he starts to strain against the intrusion. He breathes through the slight burn and suddenly it's more intense than odd, his breath expanding in the chest at the thought of her fingers moving inside him, her other hand bracing against his inner thigh. She is stroking and opening, two fingers now, maybe three, and there is pressure and need spiraling through his belly.

He’s hard, and he wants to thrust and fight and fuck, hold her down, fuck her against the wall, take what she has to give, and then Steve says “Oh god,” and “More,” and then “Please, doc, I want you to…” and Bruce knows he’s asking permission, from both of them.

He thinks _oh_. And _no_. Then Natasha twists her fingers again, swirling her tongue around the knob of his cock, pulling off with a wet slurping sound to kiss his thigh. She bites with sharp teeth, soothes with her tongue and he thinks, _yes_.

“Yeah,” he says, “Okay.” 

Steve releases him and he leans forward, digs his hands into her thick hair red as blood, and kisses her until he can’t breathe. 

She gently withdraws and pushes to her feet, cleaning her hands with the towel. She peels off her underwear and holds out her hand to help him out of the chair, and they both turn to Steve, who’s eyes are wide, a flush running down his entire body, so hard it’s indecent even through the sweatpants. He reaches for them both.

~*~

Blissed out, sprawled out on his back, Steve can’t help but think of Natasha’s word _permutations_. He’s not really doing her justice right now, half-heartedly rubbing and suckling, clutching at her hip and ass as she grinds on his face. She leans forward over him, hand wrapped around the back of his knee to pull it towards his shoulder, using him for balance as she kisses Bruce.

Steve has no idea how Bruce is focusing enough to kiss her with such desperate intensity, because he’s driving his cock into Steve in a devastating rhythm, hard and slow, hitting just the right place so that tremors of exquisite pleasure shudder through him. He’s so full, overstimulated, and someone needs to touch his cock, has to touch him. He’s so hard, straining, leaking. Throbbing on the edge.

Finally, Bruce shoves his other knee up to the side and Steve is so open, giddy and awed by the slap of flesh, the feeling of fullness, the absolute heat of finally being fucked.

Natasha’s small, strong hand wraps around his cock, and it takes nothing, a few strokes and a clever thumb against the slit and he’s coming, messy and hot all over his belly.

He shoves Natasha forward to rise on her knees, gasping for air but still holding her ass. Bruce speeds up, losing that grace as he finds his own release, awkward and beautiful, Nat holding him steady even as she’s trembling herself.

Steve gently tips her over to her side as Bruce pulls out with shaking arms, and goes to get rid of the condom in the trash. Steve rolls over, sticky with come, trying to pull himself back together, all those disparate pieces that have scattered with pleasure. Bruce returns and crawls up to the head of the bed, pressing Natasha between them on her back. Her arm is thrown over her head and Bruce links their fingers as she arches against him. She tucks one of her feet under Steve’s hip like tying down a ship before a storm. He watches as she pets herself, her belly and hips, fingertips drifting over the lips of her cunt, combing through her curls.

“Finish yourself,” Bruce coaxes in a low voice. “Let us see.” 

Steve shifts under her so her head and shoulders are supported by his chest, and his neck is starting to ache, but he can’t look away, won’t miss this. She bends her knee, letting her leg fall open to the side, and her fingers stir over her clit, rolling and pressing, teasing little patterns. Bruce groans low in his throat. Her mouth opens in an involuntary O as she finds the perfect rhythm to bring herself off, tilting and bucking, and Bruce captures her mouth to kiss her through the orgasm, hand on her throat.

~*~

Her body is rubbery, her mind nearly blank. She could maybe find sleep if she could allow it, some momentary peace. Her head rests on the hollow of Bruce’s side. His fingers gently stroke her scalp, and she thinks about letting herself nuzzle her cheek against his skin in turn. 

Steve is sacked out like a kid. Like a weary soldier, her feet tucked under his ribs, the sheet draped half over them both.

If anyone had asked her what she was doing, or why, she could have offered answers. Subtle, tricky, delicate dances of deception. Honesty writ large as cover. But the truth is she doesn’t exactly know. Just that it feels right. That the three of them are separate but linked, here in this building, amongst this team. They are shaped by serums and secrets: a soldier, and a spy, and something else. 

They each can offer moments of grace and release and freedom, and trust to receive it from the other. In here, they are not legends or monsters or dangers. She knows it’s finite. That in the face of so much unknown, the base physicality of sex - of this kind of sex, hedonistic, physical, lush and drugging - is cathartic. It is something none of them are likely to have again, out there in the worlds they inhabit, so why not hold onto it in these brief days while their odd war trickles away?

She rarely gives in to the luxury of pleasure, to the rush of controlling someone else’s desire, or to this type of gentle, tingling warmth as Bruce’s fingers stroke her hair, a thumb behind her ear, rubbing the bone like a cat made to purr.

That Bruce is tactile doesn’t surprise her, his hands rubbing together, nervous energy, contained emotions. He gestures often, fidgety little signifiers of that overactive mind, that multiplicity of focus. She believes that anger truly does ride under his skin as a constant pressure, saw as much at the table, but it seems more complicated than that - not simply another presence, but the essence of the man. And there seems to be as much truth to the way he’d turned his attentions to her in the dusky alley, the way he’d fucked Steve tonight, unafraid of a new experience once he was fully convinced that he wouldn’t do harm.

That duality fills her with warmth - his concern, and his willingness in this to trust that Steve knew what he could take.

She knows - from his files, from observation, from all of the types of intel they’d gathered - that he rarely trusts anyone with that risk, not least himself. She and Steve both are being given something precious here.

She gives in then, unexpectedly moved, rolling to kiss the thin skin over his hip bone as he brushes her hair away from her face and hums at her touch. She skims her nails along the back of his knee, breathing in the rich smell of sex, and heat, and skin. She wants to hear her name in his mouth, curving around it with lust. It’s foolishness. But she runs her nails along the backs of his thigh again, eliciting another murmur of pleasure, and then JARVIS chimes from the ceiling, sounding inexplicably a little embarrassed, like he’s sorry to interrupt.

“Doctor Banner, Mr. Stark is looking for you. I...it may be best if you find him. He’s not always respectful of locked doors.”

It hasn’t taken long for any of them to adjust to JARVIS. Natasha wonders if he remembers her, if he recognizes her as the same person as Natalie Rushman.

“Thank you,” Bruce sighs. “Is he in the lab area?”

Stark Tower isn’t actually ready for habitation, but the outlines of what it will be able to do are obvious in the bones of the guest quarters and office suites. The R&D set-up and personal lab spaces have yet to be fully stocked, but the operational equipment is already installed.

“His personal lab area in the penthouse,” JARVIS confirms.

She can feel his hesitation, the equal temptation of what Stark has to offer. 

“Go,” she says, “everybody wants a piece of you.” It’s meant lightly, or maybe it’s not. He’s been hiding from the world, and now the world wants its due. Or maybe she’s just feeling selfish and a little cruel, left behind with Steve, who is adored by the whole world and still doesn’t have anyone to call and talk to about his day.

Bruce rolls to his feet, leaving the two of them in his bed. She turns over on her stomach, shooing him to the shower.

Steve is gently snoring.


	9. Homework and Chores

Bruce ducks around some plastic sheeting. There’s a faint blue glow in the dimness, and he follows it around to the lab bench where Stark works, stripped down to an undershirt and black running pants. His hair is a ragged mess, the lines of his goatee blurred with stubble.

Bruce feels weirdly self-conscious that he's freshly showered, straight from a second sexual encounter that’s left him surprised and awed.

“Loki,” Stark begins without preamble, “is a crafty motherfucker.”

“Noted,” Bruce says.

”Huh.” Tony gives him an assessing once over and says, “Thought so.”

Bruce raises an eyebrow because a decade of covering your tracks does give you some control over an interrogation.

“Which…” Tony starts, then waves a hand. “Never mind. Just, good for you.”

He ignores that, because he got out of a bed filled with extraordinary naked people to be here, and he expects Stark to make it worthwhile.

“You've been in earthquakes,” Stark says, “natural disasters.”

He nods his assent.

“Loki is a natural disaster. And I suspect he's just biding his time, but I don't know if we can do anything about that.”

“And?”

“There _are_ things we can do something about.”

Bruce rubs his chin. He’ll need to adjust these screens if he’s going to get anything done. He really fucking misses his glasses.

“I'm in.”

~*~

Steve’s hair is remarkably fluffy, post-shower, even before he starts working it over with a towel. “Why haven’t you staked out your own quarters?”

He’s also more perceptive than she gives him credit for.

“I’m not staying.”

“None of us are, and, well, I don’t know you very well,” he ignores her smirk, “but you don’t seem like someone who...shares space. Willingly.”

He sits down on the couch next to her, combing a sharp part into his hair and smoothing it down. She resists the urge to ruffle it back up.

“I share. I can share. I’ve spent more time crammed into tiny rooms with…” Fuck. “Clint and Coulson and I. We spent a lot of time together. Other agents and handlers too, but when I’m not working alone, it was often with them.”

“So this is just another mission.”

She leaves the couch and goes to dig around Bruce’s little kitchen. These suites feel like model homes, apartments Stark is testing out for the rest of the tower. There’s a box of microwave popcorn in the cabinet. She wonders if it came into the suite with the wingback chairs and the vases on the shelves, or if Bruce scavenged it from Stark’s penthouse pantry the night before.

She opens it, puts it in the microwave, and leans against the counter.

“Not like any other mission,” she says finally, “but it is a mission. One that’s not finished.”

“Yeah,” Steve nods. “I think I can still do some good here, I feel like we need to be here.”

“We?”

The only reason she’s still here is because Clint won’t leave. She hasn’t really thought about being part of another type of _we_. Aside from this odd triangular mix of herself and Rogers and Banner, but that’s...something else, strange and intimate and personal. Steve is talking about a team.

“We still have a job,” he concludes.

She thinks, _You have a job. I’m just biding my time._

That she can wonder both if that’s true, and whether she wants it to be, is something new.

Steve flips on the tv, the matter apparently settled and she doesn’t ask him why he’s still here instead of back in his own giant suite. Doesn’t ask herself.

She’s texted back and forth with Clint, seeing if she can get a bead on his mood, his needs. Maria Hill is also sending her updates and ETAs and intel from Fury. Hill thinks they’ll open up the airspace over New York in 36 hours, resume domestic flights and send in FEMA and the National Guard. She also warns Natasha to prep for a new assignment soon after airspace opens. That’s no surprise.

She settles back next to Steve and he gives a questioning glance between her and the classic movie channel. “Did you want to watch something else? The news?”

Natasha shakes her head. “No need. Besides, I like these.”

They watch in silence for awhile. It’s noir week. She’s seen many of them.

“You remind a little of those actresses,” Steve says. “So cool and collected. Still, I’m surprised you like them. Most people these days...don’t.”

This is still her secret to share, her life to dole out, and maybe she’d like to give Steve something. After all, who else can he talk to?

“We had a lot of downtime on missions. Barton likes Westerns, and Coulson watched all of these corny old musicals, so I found something in the middle that I liked.”

Steve digs into the bag of popcorn. “They used to call some of ‘em women’s pictures, although not these. I liked Myrna Loy, Claudette Colbert. My mom loved the movies. We’d go, sometimes, when there was a little extra. Bucky and I, we’d go see those cartoons and war movies and really anything.”

After she’d defected, on long stakeouts when she was awake and Clint was asleep, she’d watch all those black and white films with fast talking and witty quips. For awhile, her idiomatic English was seventy years out of date, and he gave her a constant ration of shit for it, but she’d figured out the rhythms and accents of English from Ginger Rogers’ plucky pout, and Katharine Hepburn’s broad vowels, and Ingrid Bergman’s accented perfection. She’d learned stillness from those hours of Hitchcock, the tease from Billy Wilder, ruthlessness from Barbara Stanwyck, and charm from Audrey Hepburn.

European films gave her a sultry seductive insouciance, an air of mystery. Bollywood a sense of the dramatic, the flamboyant, a certain clean sweetness. But the Americans? No one did better banter.

She slouches into Steve, and watches _Out of the Past_ with Captain America.

~*~

“If you could do something...after,” Stark asks, “to make it better. What would it be?”

Bruce is analyzing an acidic compound. It breaks things down, but neutralizing it is too difficult. Too risky.

“I do what I can,” he says, “when I know what I’ve done. Medical care, labor...whatever.”

Stark snorts. “You’ve got a once in a generation mind, Banner, and you wanna hand out bandaids, haul water. That’s all well and good, but it’s a waste.”

“A lot of fine minds haul water every day,” Bruce shrugs. He doesn’t feel the need to justify his choices. “I’m chaos and destruction. I don’t think bringing some small order to the typhoon of disaster is a waste.”

“Better to find a real solution,” Stark says.

“That didn’t end so well for the outer boroughs,” he says, absently. And there’s a bark of loud, genuine laughter from Tony. 

“Fair enough,” he says, then, “Can you check this? Squishy biology’s not really my thing.”

“This is chemistry,” Bruce says, but swipes the data to his screen where it automatically enlarges to something legible. “Here’s the issue; I don’t think we want that kind of chain reaction...”

They work in easy silence until he realizes that Stark has fallen asleep over his notes.

~*~

It’s nearly four in the morning when he gets back to the suite. Steve is sleeping on the couch, and Natasha is in the bed.

The television is still on, a black and white movie barely audible.

She opens her eyes when he comes in and he strips down quietly, gesturing at her to go back to sleep like they can all pretend she was dozing. She nods her chin at the chair, and he puts on the loose sleep pants he finds there, a soft cotton t-shirt.

His eyes flicker between the bed and the couch, questioning, and she flips the sheet back in invitation. It’s an easy choice. Steve takes up the entire sofa.

He sits up against the headboard. He’s so tired, but sleep seems like something that happens to other people. She’s curled against the pillow, back nearly flush to the headboard. The sheet drapes over the curve of her hip, and the t-shirt stretches as she tucks her fist under her cheek. He lightly rests his fingertips on her shoulder, and when she doesn’t tense or twitch him off, he cups her upper arm, and closes his eyes.

~*~

“I just can’t leave yet.” Clint swirls his coffee around in the paper cup. “But you don’t have to stay.”

“You need to go home.”

“Look, I know that you’ve got an assignment, and I probably have at least a month of psych evals and rehab and debriefing, but you don’t have to babysit me, Nat. I’m not Cooper. I’m not you. Loki’s out of my head, and I’m just trying...to do what’s right.”

It smarts. It shouldn’t. He’s right. But it hurts. Made worse because he won’t talk to her about it, just clams up, says he’s fine but still won’t go home to his family. Won’t leave the city. And she won’t leave him until he does.

“There are other ways to make restitution,” she says softly, “And Laura--”

“Don’t,” Clint’s voice is sharp, unforgiving. “You don’t get to tell me…”

She holds up her hands, backs away. “Fine. We’ll go back out. Dig more rubble. Babysit volunteers. Tag bodies. Whatever you want.”

“Nat.”

“No, clearly, this is something you need to do. So we’ll do it.”

She stalks out of the kitchen, feeling ill-tempered, unreasonable even though she’s right, and nearly bounces off Bruce as he’s coming in.

He puts a hand on her arm, warm and questioning but she shoves past him. He pulls back his hand like she’s stung him with one of her bites.

Guilt pricks at her.

She stops, squares her shoulders. Turns back to him, but he’s moved into the kitchen and is already talking with Clint.

“I’m staying here today. The clinics have things well in hand, and Tony and I...we think we might be able to synthesize something that will help with the rubble removal. We’re not sure we’ve got the right equipment here, and certainly we couldn’t produce it in mass quantities, but...it makes more sense to work on it.” He catches her eye, fiddling with his coffee cup, and holds her gaze. “I’ll check in later, see if the clinic I was at yesterday needs help.”

“That sounds good, doc,” Clint says, “I’m with Consuelo’s crew again today. Maybe we’ll see you down there this afternoon.”

She watches Bruce take his mug off to the labs, feeling a growing sense of emptiness. They all have such purpose, while she’s a tool waiting for proper use. A scalpel slicing open a plastic bag. 

“I’ll meet you downstairs,” she says to Clint, and heads for the elevator.

~*~

The Chitauri skeleton is wrapped like a ribbon around the apartment building, having pulverized the highest levels. Natasha leads her team through the remaining sets of stairs. Black Xs litter the lower structures where the weight of the skeleton sent it down, crumbling onto its foundation.

She recognizes the Hulk’s handiwork in the severed whale head several buildings away. This area had been amongst those supposedly evacuated during the battle. That hadn’t helped the couple in the ancient Pinto, crushed under the weight of the monstrous broken skull.

She’s suddenly glad that Bruce is back in Stark’s tower, applying himself to a larger problem.

Steve is eating a sandwich, still on his feet, when she gets back to their storefront headquarters. He hands her one, and she asks him to follow her.

They stand at the base of the building, looking up.

“I forget,” she says, “or maybe it isn’t forgetting, so much as pushing aside what he can do. The Hulk.”

That’s not exactly true. She sees it when she closes her eyes, the purity of his rage as he’d chased her, the power in his shoulders as he smashed into the Chitauri. He is as alien as the actual aliens. He is a product of this same power that transformed Steve, that gives her the edge she will never discuss. How has it made them all so different? How can she look at this building and coldly assess the situation, want to see Steve’s reaction like another piece of a puzzle. How can Steve look at it from a tactical perspective and still have that pained empathy on his face? How would Bruce see it? As a failure or a success? She suspects the former.

“SHIELD is collecting the remains,” she says. “For study. For safekeeping.”

Her phone beeps and Natasha pulls it out, taps it. She files the quiet curiosity away.

“Speak of the devil,” she says, letting Steve read the message. The airspace will re-open in six hours, National Guard dropping in four, and she already has an itinerary for debriefing and reassignment.

Their war is over.

~*~

There’s now a fire pit in the hole Hulk had made tossing Loki around like a rag doll. Odd, twinkly LEDs and a cooler full of beer complete the scene. Stark drinks champagne out of a bottle, lounging on one of the white couches he'd dragged onto the flight deck.

Steve looks down. Sprinkled throughout the city are patches of light. Slowly, the power grid is coming back online. SHIELD will be able to assert its authority once again, clear the interstellar debris and let the city take care of the rest.

Stark was a huge part of that - his resources, his influence. His voice on the phone, in hundreds of ears to help get the city back on its feet. Steve feels humbled by the efforts, by the accusations he’d flung at Stark before Loki’s attack. It’s not that Steve thinks he’s wrong, but it amazes him that battle keeps teaching him how people can be more than one thing. He himself is a dichotomy. There’s another lesson there, but introspection feels like self-pity, and Steve can’t go down that road, certainly not alone.

Tomorrow Thor will take Loki back to Asgard, and the rest of them will disperse. There’s a heavy loneliness in Steve's chest that feels ridiculous. He barely knows these people and yet the idea of walking away from them leaves him oddly bereft.

A warm hand on his shoulder brings him back to the present, and Bruce hands him a beer. Another dichotomy, this man who is scientist and monster, and so fucking kind in the face of a world that’s used him so poorly that Steve wants to press into him, take the damage and hurt, absorb it like the Other Guy absorbs bullets.

Instead, Steve takes the beer with an apologetic,”I don't get drunk.”

“It's a party,” Stark’s laugh is edged, but real, “you need a drink, even if it’s for show.”

~*~

“So, battles and bonfires and orgies?” Stark asks.

Thor raises one big shoulder, “At times, yes.”

Bruce laughs, sharp with surprise. He takes a small sip of the liquor Thor has passed around, honey sweet and so potent Natasha can feel the pulse of it heating her veins.

“You would know,” Stark directs this at Banner, ”About the orgies and bonfires.” 

Natasha gives Stark a hard look. Is he pushing buttons or talking out of his ass? But no one else calls him on it and Bruce waves him off like they’ve got their own language.

Maybe they already do.

“Fewer orgies,” Bruce says, “More bonfires. Sometimes stakes and pitchforks to go with them.”

Stark snorts.

“My brother…” Thor is mournful, but determined. “He wasn’t always this man, angry and desperate, hungry to punish me for my sins against him, to take power.” He looks at Clint. “He owes you much, for what he took, but truly he wasn’t always such.”

Clint quirks up his mouth, mirthless. “Thor, I appreciate the sentiment, but I just do not give two shits about what he used to be. I care about what he is now.”

She catches his eye. He doesn’t give her anything, and she can’t tell if this is progress or still more self-flagellation.

“He has been ill-used by my father’s deceptions,” Thor says quietly, “by my own carelessness. I do not think his actions are justified, I simply wish to bear my own responsibility, and that of the things I did to help shape him. No matter his actions, he is still family.”

“There’s always a choice,” she says softly. “Even with family.”

“He will face the consequences of those choices tomorrow,” says Thor. “But not alone.”

Natasha shakes her head, and uncurls from the couch. Ultimately, they’re all alone. It is a thought that sits heavily with her as she stands idly in the kitchen.

“I’m not sure I could be that noble,” Bruce says behind her, “To look at the role I might have played in shaping a monster, even for family.”

“Boy Scout badges,” she taunts, and it comes out meaner than she intended, mocking insead of teasing.

He just rumples his brow, sardonic as he shoots back, “Balancing your checkbook of death.”

She takes the hit and smiles, because they’re both wrong, both right. She steps into his space. He holds his ground, eyes dark, glinting. She puts her hand on his chest and he covers her fingers, and tugs her into the shadows.

~*~

Steve has finished the beer, and he doesn’t have much to add to Thor’s statement. Family is something you choose as often as something you’re born into, and he knows in his heart that there’s nothing he wouldn’t do for those he considers family.

Of all the things that have changed, that is not one of them. He can feel it, like a spur lodged underneath his sternum, the loneliness, the feeling of absence and loss. The Commandos, Peggy, Bucky, Howard...hell, even the chorus girls. Lost in time.

And none of it really matters.

He doesn’t know what to think about the fact that the two times he’s really felt like himself in the past month, since he woke up and came to the terms he was going to come to about this new world around him, those two times were fighting and fucking.

He looks over at Stark, and raises the bottle at him. He looks enough like Howard that Steve gets a little misty, but there’s something hollowed out and brittle about him, and maybe Howard was too later on, but that’s not the man Steve knew.

God he misses them.

~*~

It’s the only dark corner in Stark’s penthouse and Natasha has pressed Bruce into it, alien liquor loosening her limbs, her tongue, and he is taking it. Craving it.

The skin of her hip is warm and silky, his thumb stroking the indent of her pelvis, that inviting dip and hollow. She buries her nose in his neck, teeth sharp on the skin of his throat. She’s worked her fingers in between the buttons of his shirt, twisting his nipple, thigh pressed up between his legs as he tightens his grip on her hair.

He eases her head back so he can look in her eyes, but all he can see is the glossy sheen of her wide pupils. She’s not giving him anything but want, and he can’t help himself, he kisses her, hard and bruising as she digs her nails into his chest and bites at his lip.

There’s a _ding_ , and Stark yells from the flight deck for someone to grab ice. 

Natasha lets him go, turning away like it’s nothing, but she’s breathing hard.

“I need a minute,” he grits out. He feels used, battered. It doesn’t stop him from wanting her. He just wishes he knew what she wanted, that she’d tell him. But she keeps deflecting, turning the question away.

Maybe Steve can draw it out of her, but he’d half convinced himself that maybe she’d tell him, let him see, let them both. It’s an illusion, that he knows her at all. That she has any obligation to let any of them know her.

She’s putting ice into a metal bowl, and he can breathe again, erection easing down, heart rate retreating.

“What’s next?” he asks her softly, and she tilts her head. “For you.” He doesn’t want her to think he believes he has any claim on her time, her choices.

The past two nights had been these remarkable escapes, memories he will keep tight, bury deep and pull out in the future when he needs somewhere to retreat. And he’s selfish enough to hope she might use these memories in the same way. Comfort and longing and pleasure.

“Another mission,” she says. “That’s always what’s next.”

She turns towards him then, and puts her cold fingers on his cheek, traces down his jaw, then picks up the bowl of ice and goes back to the party.

~*~

“Seriously, Banner. Come to California.” Tony looks at him through the crystal tumbler. It’s dark out now, the only light that rising from the firepit. “We’re close on the rubble deconstructor. And you’d have all my resources at your disposal. We could figure it out. Plus, where else are you gonna go?”

They’d worked well together, first on the carrier, then today. Talking to Stark is like speaking his native language after years of working in translation. It eases something in Bruce. Plus Tony has this...fearlessness in the face of his alter ego. In the face of everything really. The brash confidence that comes from always being the brightest guy in the room, the wealthiest, the most charming, the guy who always gets what he wants...even if he also sometimes gets what he doesn’t want, and has to turn dross into gold with a particle accelerator.

That charm is hard to resist when it’s aimed at you, even more challenging when you’re just coasting on the after-effects. Plus, he thinks maybe Tony’s enjoying his own sense of homecoming.

Steve is roasting marshmallows over the fire pit while Natasha surreptitiously eats the chocolate out of the packet instead of handing it over for s’mores. They don’t actually have any graham crackers anyway.

It’s so tempting, going to California instead of fleeing again, a temptation amplified by all of the things Bruce has been indulging in the past few days. It wouldn’t be difficult to give in for just a little longer.

“I’m not much good at staying in one place these days,” he says instead, because he can’t give in. Not yet. There’s too much at stake, and he can’t make decisions based on a few days of purpose and warmth, and incredibly distracting sex. The other guy renders such decisions moot most of the time, and now he’s just reminded the world that he exists. Bruce isn’t sure of the ramifications of that, but he’s going to have to make a decision by tomorrow.

“Well, then come and stay until we figure out the compound.”

“Maybe,” Bruce says. “Maybe I will.”

~*~

“I want to see what’s changed,” Steve says. “I’d never been further than Manhattan before the war. And then we toured with the show, but it’s not like we saw much more than theaters and diners and rooming houses.”

“There’s a lot to see,” Bruce says, “a lot of space to unwind in.”

Steve shoots him a grateful smile, and Clint adds, “I spent a lot of time in a truck, when I was a kid. There’s a lot of fucked up out there, but some good stuff too.”

“I’d like to take a bike,” he says.

Clint even lets a wry smile through. “Good thing you’ve got an ass made of steel. Oh wait, that’s Superman.”

Steve had just been thinking out loud at first, but the more he considers it, the more the idea feels right. Slow travel, time to himself, and if that thought is lonelier than he’d hoped, there’s also something freeing about being able to go where he wants to, when he wants to.

“If you get bored,” Natasha says, amused in a way that isn’t quite funny, “I’m sure there’s a bunk at SHIELD with your name on it.”

~*~

Clint’s had just enough beer to be slurry, or maybe it’s that the tension he’s been bearing has eased somewhat and he’s drunk with relief. He leans against her back.

She has sat this way with him in battle, in the aftermath, spines pressing together, knowing from the ways he tensed or shifted where his body and focus were headed to next. Giving him the same types of wordless signals.

Now, she can feel the heaving shift of ribs as he breathes around a weight, as he slackens into her. His voice is low, just enough for her to hear, “Orgies, Nat? Really?”

She digs an elbow into his ribs, but doesn’t obfuscate. “Not orgies. Not really. Just...something.”

She tilts her head back enough to press against his.

“You’re not alone, Clint.” It sounds awkward, but then she’s not really built for comfort, not trained in succor or kindness.

“Nat…”

She closes her eyes against her name, the pain wrapped around it, holds steady as his warmth seeps into her. She feels a stab of something for Thor, then. There is nothing you don’t do for family, except let them suffer alone.

Clint’s whisper is like the grate of gravel on stone. “I have to go home, don’t I?”

Of the people in this room, half of them, herself included, are without homes to return to. She won’t continue to let him off the hook. That is, finally, what she can do for him in the face of his own demons, of aliens and gods and monsters. 

“Yeah,” she sighs, “you do.”

They don’t say goodnight, just slip away from the others, and after she pulls off Clint’s boots and pours him into bed, she sets the alarm on his phone for 5 a.m. Because the best revenge is often petty.

Laura picks up on the third ring.

“Tomorrow,” Natasha says instead of hello.

She hears a hiccupy noise in the background, Laura murmuring, “Shh, baby, shh.”

Natasha swallows, and waits.

“Nightmare,” Laura explains, “I wouldn’t let Lila watch tv, but she’s stubborn, flipped it on when I was making dinner.”

Natasha sets her jaw, the sliver of compassion for the gods dissolving. 

“Clint’ll be okay,” she says, finally. “I’ll make sure of it, but he’s gonna need time. Help. This is...well, I don’t know how much I’ll be able to be around, but I’ll be there when I can.”

“He’ll get it,” Laura says, “even when he’s too stubborn to ask. Partnership, right? Sometimes you know what they need better than they do.”

She laughs, the joke an old one between them. And then Natasha hears another shaky hiccup that is relief breaking over the other woman.

“It’s gonna be okay,” Natasha promises. “Even when it’s not. He’s alive. He’s whole. He’s…”

“Coming home,” Laura says. “Thank you. Stay safe, Nat.”

“Kiss the kids for me.”

Laura hangs up, and Natasha keeps looking at her phone. She thinks about going back to the roof. She thinks about finding the suite Stark set aside for her and going to sleep. Going downstairs, hailing a cab if any are running yet. Going to SHIELD’s Manhattan office. Saying fuck it, and disappearing into the night.

She wonders if Steve tastes like marshmallows now. How Thor’s honeysweet liquor will translate in the curl of Bruce’s tongue. How long it will take until she can no longer remember the heady scent of the skin around his mouth, or the fear pulsing in her veins as he raised his fist to end her life, those things combining to make her feel something desperate, and necessary. 

How Steve’s hand on her shoulder can feel like a promise and approval and forward momentum she’s not sure she wants. His hands on her ass warm and comforting.

How there’s something equally safe and terrifying about being held between the two of them. Darkness and light is too simple, not nearly accurate. In Bruce she sees hints of her reflection, in Steve her aspirations, and she will always hew towards the gray even as she craves the light.

She wants them both, so very differently. Wants the reflection of belief in Steve, and the compassion of understanding from Bruce. Lust, and ambition, and ultimately, the kindness of two good men, giving and taking as she offers them each a translation of the other through what she understands of herself.

One more night, a gift, and she can’t ignore that symmetry. Three nights. Three sides of a triangle. She goes back upstairs to the party.


	10. Tea Party

Bruce spies her in the shadow of the doorway, hand pressed against the glass like she's making a decision. Tony follows his gaze, and gets out of his seat heading towards her.

He doesn't want or need Stark running interference, but Natasha can hold her own against Tony.

Sure, it feels a little like a betrayal to leave her to it, but he’s facing a fire, and an uncertain future, and he can’t get lost in the memory of her cool mouth, her slick, sweet tongue, her clever fingers and the depth of loss in her eyes she’s so good at hiding except when she’s lost to pleasure, and still guarded even then.

He tries to catch Steve’s eye, but Steve is polishing off marshmallows, staring into the fire like it’s got a future laid out for him.

~*~

They’d built fires in Europe, huddling around pits in basecamp. Sometimes there was singing. A lot of smoking. Bullshitting. Camaraderie. Even so, Steve just looks in the fire and thinks of buildings burning.

He’s been researching campsites on the phone Stark handed him the day before yesterday. He could travel between here and California. See the country. Sure, he’s a city boy, but he’s no stranger to sleeping outside, uncomfortable as it may be.

As boys, he and Bucky had always talked about California. Seeing the place where oranges supposedly grew all year round. His mom had always wanted to go somewhere warm in the winter, sit in the sand and eat citrus. Had wanted to take him, had hoped it’d help his asthma. He wonders what she’d think if she could see him.

Howard used to talk about Hollywood, about sunshine and movie sets, and the seat of the aviation industry. And now Steve is staring into Howard’s son’s makeshift hearth, contemplating a future, and fucking, and fighting with Tony about what’s next.

Camping sounds plenty appealing right now. Or he could just stay in motels, sleep in a bed; he won’t lie, that sounds better. It’s a big, strange world out there, and he enjoys a bed at the end of a tiring day. It’s a small strange world in here. The same rules apply.

He looks up, following Banner’s gaze to see Romanoff and Stark standing off in the broken penthouse. Something twists a little as he watches them. These people aren’t friends, aren’t family, but then neither were the Commandos when he met them, and the same thing applies. He’s not sure he likes them yet, but he’d lay down his life for them.

Romanoff cocks her head with that expression like she’d as soon take a poke at Stark as look at him, and Banner bites his lip with both worry and anticipation, and those things combined flood Steve with a warm rush of lust.

She’s very beautiful, visceral and contained, while Banner is so very watchful, his control a tangible challenge. Steve cannot help himself with the wanting, this complicated, lovely net of trust and uncertainty between all three of them.

~*~

Natasha rolls her eyes before Stark even gets to her, but still lets him steer her delicately to the bar, pushing with one finger against her upper arm.

She edges away from the point of contact, pouring expensive bourbon into a tumbler. The bourbon’s a feint, she’s already got a vague headache from Thor’s liquor, or maybe from lack of sleep, but Stark doesn’t need to know that.

He’s less obtuse than he appears though. He takes the glass from her, jerking his head towards the open door, and doesn’t pull his punches. “So tell me, Mata Hari, what are you getting from this?”

“It’s none of your business, Stark,” she says.

He huffs, impatient. “Seducing them for SHIELD? Something more benign? Something less?”

She keeps her gaze steady and blank, knowing it’ll further agitate him. It does.

“I'm not judging,” he continues, “But what is this, really? Are you part of the benefits package?”

Sure, she had played the honeytrap with him, just enough to work her way into the gap between him and Pepper at the time, but she had never been more than half a tease, using his own expectations against him until that no longer worked as a strategy. Maybe he has cause to doubt her, but she’d also helped save his life, saved his best friend, and helped him save the world not two days ago. Stark isn’t lazy enough to think calling names is any real kind of argument. He’s testing the waters, looking to get a rise out of her.

She sips the bourbon at him.

He’s trying to find his own place in this by antagonizing her in a way he won’t with Bruce - who’s already equal parts precious and skittish - and can’t with Steve without it getting a lot more personal.

He prods her with a flick of his eyebrows. 

She doesn’t care if he thinks she’s whoring herself out for the greater good, it’s a small minded assumption from such a broad intellect, but he’s been through a lot, and she recognizes the protectiveness driving it. She won’t deny it still stings a little, not that she’ll let him see that. 

This thing she’s been doing, she isn't doing it for SHIELD. It’s for her. At least, she keeps telling herself that. But does she really know the difference? Does she know where SHIELD ends and she begins anymore? She used to. She’s become...entangled with the agency, using it for her redemption.

“They need to decide what their futures look like,” she says to Stark. “But I’m not trying to steer that.” She thinks of Clint, and the orders she’s ignored to give him time. Maybe she can still tell the difference.

“You leave. That’s what you do,” he says. “So, think of what you want to leave behind.”

Either man safe is an appealing thought, but SHIELD has never really meant safety, just people she can trust with a certain number of secrets.

“They don't know what you are, not really,” Stark says.

She thinks, _neither do you_.

“They see you as a soldier, a messenger, a savior...not a spy.”

There’s some truth to that, but it’s only a piece.

“Stark,” she puts her hand on his wrist, gentling her voice, her eyes, her body. “You need to sleep. I have no orders to do anything but present Banner and Rogers with options. _Official_ options, of which I am no part.”

She leans in, brushing her mouth over his ear. “I’m fucking them because I want to, Tony. Not because anyone told me to.”

His cheeks flame, and he pulls his head back. Nods.

She puts her hand on his chest, poking at his discomfort. “You’re advocating for your own causes, too. I know Banner is one of them.”

When she turns her head she sees Bruce lounging in the doorway, head cocked, curiosity playing across his features. She doesn’t think he can hear them. Something tightens in her throat, and in any other circumstances she’d explain, but she neither owes him an explanation nor could conceive of one that would matter.

Bruce’s eyes soften, expression opaque, and want spikes through her. She wants his skin against her tongue, his hands, his knees, his nipples, his teeth, his thick, beautiful cock.

She’d stride over and sink to her knees right there, but Stark would misinterpret it.

Bruce has learned to read her, though, and his eyes get dark and wide. He turns slightly, head towards Steve, and part of her wants to say _no...just you and I_. Burning down the world, and each other. But no, Steve is the lynchpin, the failsafe, Steve is the grace that makes this work, makes it something transcendent and not sordid. She gives him the kindest smile she can.

“Fuck.” Stark says, reminding her of his presence, “Fuck me. I need to sleep.”

She busses a kiss on his cheek and says, “Keep him safe, or I’ll make you sorry.”

He jumps back like he’s been burned, gives her a little salute.

Bruce says, “Tony,” and “Can I help?” as Stark careens past him, waving him off. She turns on her heel and makes her way down to Steve’s room.

~*~

Steve’s big hands span Romanoff’s waist, brushing up over her ribs as she raises her arms and lets him strip the t-shirt off her body, get rid of her bra. He skims his fingers over her shoulders and arms, revels as she buries her hand in his hair, breasts prominently displayed. Her skin is so soft, not like anyone Steve has ever touched, the firm flesh and taut muscle underplaying her lush form.

He mouths her neck as he opens up her jeans, peeling them off her round hips, letting her step out of them, kneeling to disentangle her feet. From there he presses kisses to the backs of her thighs, her knees, her spine as she stands there in underwear so fine and delicate they seem more revealing than her bare skin.

He strokes her belly and can feel the flutter of want, nuzzling his head into the curve of her waist and watching Banner straining with desire as well, hands rubbing against themselves. 

Steve’s not complaining, hard and heavy with the picture they both paint, all that constrained longing. But he’d started on the sidelines and now he’s somehow the conduit between them, pulled tight like the string in a game of telephone.

Steve looks up at her from under his brows and asks, “Why do you do this to him?”

Her voice is so thready that he’s not sure how she manages, but she scratches her nails over his scalp, and says, “Because he likes it,” and he can’t believe how kind she sounds.

Steve catches Bruce’s eye, gets a twisted half-smile that is all the answer he needs.

“Touch her,” Bruce says from his seat, “Please, see how wet she is, how much she wants this.”

Steve swallows hard, cups her warm, damp cunt through the silk, and she arches back her head. He can smell her, rich and heady. The fabric is slick.

He strokes his thumb over the damp patch, over and over again and she’s got such perfect control, but he can feel the frisson of desire vibrating in her spine.

Bruce has his cock out, loosely circling his shaft, stroking, but holding himself back. It’s hypnotic. His want, his restraint. His need in the face of both.

Steve hooks his thumb in the edge of her delicate underwear, and draws them down her legs. Natasha steps out of them, kicks them aside.

He stands up, dragging his fingers through her wetness, stroking up her body. He paints her lips with her moisture, and she licks his fingers. She turns her head, and pulls Steve down to meet her kiss.

“It’s your turn,” she says against his lips, “to fuck him.”

Steve nips at her, shudders.

Permutation number three.

~*~

It hasn’t gotten any less strange, kissing Steve, the bristling scruff around the softness of his mouth, those big hands on his face and neck.

It’s just that the part that’s weird isn’t that he’s a man, but that it’s Steve. And that’s also the part that’s become, over the past few days, the normalizing factor. Steve’s presence casts a wholesome light on the whole debauched operation. There’s a purity to him, smart mouth and rock hard ass aside, that humbles Bruce.

Steve’s looking for solace, for connection, for a place to be. He’s looking for something, not running away or trying to get lost.

Natasha pulls Bruce back against her breasts, her pelvis flush to the base of his spine, stroking both of them from Steve’s waist to Bruce’s chest and down to his hip, rubbing warm circles. Her cheek is tucked into his neck, teeth hard on the tendon.

His belly tightens with want, the vision of her writhing at Steve’s careful touch, from the stroke of Steve’s tongue along his own, from the giddy terror of what he’s about to allow.

“Just...be careful...” He’s not worried about himself ultimately. But there’s such a risk, and it’s so selfish to take it. Natasha’s hand strokes down his back, and he shivers with the loss of her heat, but she’s trailing her fingers over the knot of his spine, digging into the gluteus maximus, cupping the curve of his ass and skating over the back of his thighs.

He’s tensing, twitchy with desire, nervy with anticipation, and she nuzzles his cheek, lips against his ear, puff of warm breath. “Think about how it felt,” she murmurs, “when you were inside me. Hot, and tight, and slick from the lube, stretched and illicit and…” his head falls back against Natasha’s shoulder. “What it was like to fuck him, all that power under your hands, how he took what you gave…”

He’s lived in his head for decades, for his whole life really, so it’s nothing to visualize those moments even as she tortures him with fleeting feathery touch and heated words. She knows how to drive him to the edge, and he feels himself relax just enough, trusting her to do her work.

Steve wraps his big hand around Bruce’s cock, strokes nearly frictionless from the lubricant and Bruce thrusts into the grip. She tweaks his nipple and murmurs, “He deserves this, doesn’t he?” Bruce gasps, and stutters out a yes.

“It felt so good,” she says, “Pleasure, with that hint of pain, just enough to keep you in your body, and I’ll be there with you. Keeping you steady, keeping you focused.”

“So much,” he says, “What if it’s too much?”

“It won’t be,” she says. “I promise you. We’ll be safe, we’ll be careful...” 

“There’s no such thing as safe,” Bruce says, and gives in.

~*~

Natasha’s on her back now with Bruce on hands and knees above her. She keeps one hand on Bruce’s face and strokes his shoulders and his chest with feathery seductive touches. Steve feels Bruce’s muscles twitch as he responds to her, easing himself in finally as they both coax him open.

It feels so very good, to be buried inside him, and Steve’s grateful for the barrier of the rubber, keeping the intense pleasure of that pressure just far enough away that he can control this, take his time, make it good for all three of them.

No one had told him that the serum would make getting off something new, something different. Not that it had taken Steve long to suss it out, but it still required concentration, awareness.

Fucking is different than being fucked. Satisfying in a different way, connecting in a different way, an act of giving and taking and this...there aren’t categories to define it, even if Steve really had words for what it was he was feeling beyond _this_...and _mine…_ and _good_...and _oh god more_.

Bruce trails fingers along Natasha’s thigh, over her breast, her cheek, dragging a thumb over her bottom lip. He grounds himself in her supple skin, her moans.

She is crooning, and whatever she sees in his eyes moves her forward, meeting his mouth with rough, open kisses, teeth flashing. Steve bears down tightly on Bruce’s hips, and he opens just a fraction more, unfurling in his spine as she kisses him, and it is unbearably hot, exactly what Steve has wanted. To be surrounded, engulfed as he bears witness, to be part of something bigger, and yet removed from it at the same time. This balls deep pleasure as he fucks Bruce achingly slow, but harder and harder, with the smacking sound of flesh against flesh as the man takes it, as Steve brings out these deep, needy groans from him, while Natasha keeps him present, keeps him safe in the right frame of mind. 

Natasha pushes Bruce’s shoulders back, and Steve takes the direction. Her eyes are wide, pupils blown, and he adjusts to sit back on his heels, Bruce’s knees spread, cock nearly purple. Steve scratches down Bruce’s chest, reveling in the twitching pulses around his own cock in response.

Bruce whimpers as Natasha takes him in hand, nails against his balls, and he groans, flexing his hips towards her touch. She rolls a rubber onto Bruce, whispers something in his ear that Steve can’t hear, but he feels the reverberations. She rises up and straddles their hips, one hand on Bruce’s cock, tbe other spreading her lips, maneuvering so she can sink down so deliberately that the hitching, wanton moan could have come from any of them.

God, it is so. Fucking. Good. Weight, pressure, holding Bruce between them as he twitches and pants. Powerful. Powerless. Bruce bands his arm around Natasha’s waist and reaches back to grip Steve’s neck, baring his own throat. 

Steve has been the one with no recourse but surrender, and now he has been the one to hold the chain, and it turns out they are both good, and he knows he can wield that responsibility with grace.

The trust he’s been given pricks at Steve, twisting his heart, amping up his desire, possessive and warm. 

Natasha works herself on Bruce, rolling hips and panting desperate breaths, while Steve flexes his hips and earns a groaning whimper. 

She's close, he can tell, but from the expression on her face, the way she’s biting her lip, it’s not enough. Steve summons up the tattered sense of tactical command he has left and tells her, “On your knees.” 

~*~

She’s reaching for that release, needs another angle, needs to relinquish her control, needs to have it taken, and that’s...dangerous. She hears the order in Steve’s voice, and it snags at her, teasing at everything she wants.

Bruce’s eyes fly open, pleasure and lust losing out rapidly as he focuses on her, on the connotations of Steve’s command mixed with how much he seems to want to please her. Trying to give her what she craves. Working to keep her safe. Fuck. She can’t let it stand, that serious gaze. It’s too much like the look he wore holding fast to slipping control as the...Other Guy...clawed for dominance. Natasha knows control is a line, a series of moments and decisions, practiced and honed, and there’s something cruel about forcing him to hold out any longer.

The only thing she can do is to give him something of her own.

She started out this mission inhabiting an identity, but has been too weary and goal-focused since India to be anything but herself. Empty perhaps, but not without desire. She's not acting in accordance, she's just listening. She is so weary of being herself, but she owes it to all of them to keep following through. 

This is part of the trajectory. She pushes, pulls, antagonizes or prods to get what she needs. But, here, now, she can taste what she wants. To share her pleasure.

She stills her movement.

Bruce shakes his head; he'd made them promise that someone would watch his eyes for any flickering change. To turn her back on that is not simply a gesture of trust. It’s an offering. Her heart beats faster at the thought of being fucked, of him pounding into her from behind while Rogers fucks him. That first time, she’d had Rogers to watch her back, not to mention Bruce’s own control, but this is different, this is hedonistic, and gorgeous, and their last chance. The idyll is coming to an end, and deserves a crescendo.

She trusts him in this. Steve trusts him. He has earned this trust, and this is something they can do for him. Something he, they, can do for her. Before Bruce can protest further, before fear can get the better of her, she slides off of him and rolls over to her stomach, knee hitched up so she can get her fingers between her thighs, her back arched. Offering.

“Natasha,” his voice is cracked, desperate, warm hand on her back.

She lets all of her own desperation fill her voice. “Fuck me, please, I want...” and then he’s inside her again, slamming into her, hitting that spot that’s so good, hands clenching her hips like he’ll never let go.

Steve rubs and thrusts, rutting, his hips flush to Bruce’s, and she can feel the slide of it. The power of those thrusts, the dirty, decadent sounds of flesh against flesh. Bruce covers her fingers over her clit, their hands threading together, moving through her sloppy wetness, and she holds him in place, and then he’s pinching and pressing in that way she likes best at the end and the orgasm comes out of nowhere, catches her hard, rolls through her body with this unexpected intensity, and she cries out, pulsing and clutching around his cock, fingernails digging into his wrist.

It’s enough to set off Bruce, who holds her hips and fucks her through the orgasm, speeding up to slam into her, fucking himself between her cunt and Steve’s cock, and he comes with jerky, stuttering thrusts.

He pulls her back to his chest, dragging those clever fingers over her belly and breasts, kissing and biting down on her shoulder and still rubbing her clit, mercilessly driving her to another release. He’s holding her against the glorious assault as Steve truly allows himself to let go, to hold them both, to find his own pleasure in the vigorous, rough scattershot rhythm of his own gasping release.

She slides herself forward, collapsing onto the pillows, and closes her eyes. The bed dips up and down, and then big, warm hands roll her onto her back and she flings her arms up over her head.


	11. Hide and Seek

Natasha looks as spent and sated as he’s ever seen her, her face flushed and utterly at ease.

Banner is looking at her like she's an answer to a question he didn't know how to ask, and Steve feels that deep in his belly, tightening his balls despite his recent release. He’s been there. Steve has begged and pleaded, teased and withheld, learning the power of that with pretty girls, with Bucky when they used to take each other to the edge and leave themselves there, trying to figure things out, so close to sex but not crossing that line, so they could pretend, deny, and yet still feel it, low and deep. 

It used to leave Steve so raw, so needy, but he’s not sure he’s ever felt as raw as Bruce looks. The other man is trembling with it, gazing down at Natasha, and Steve asks him what’s wrong, and he just shakes his head.

“I’m fine,” he says, “I just, I’m gonna sit down.”

It hits Steve then. What kind of life Bruce has lead that he can still sound so honest and be such a liar, when his body literally betrays him and he still can't ask for comfort.

Fuck, how much comfort must Banner have been denied? Denied himself? 

He doesn’t think it’s Romanoff, exactly, or at least not completely. For all they’ve given each other the past few days, they’ve held just as much back.

But Steve knows what it’s like to look at possibility held just out of reach. Something, or someone, who in the right set of circumstances could shift the tenor of your life. 

He’d felt like that before every recruitment physical, in that month of basic training, praying that Dr. Erskine would pick him, that Agent Carter would see him as worthy.

But Bruce’s life isn’t that kind of fairy tale, and Steve thinks that maybe the good only highlights the tragedy, that as the other man looks at the bed, at Natasha’s pinkened skin and curves, at Steve’s own broad shoulders, it might feel a little bit like a taunt.

He reaches out to put a hand on Bruce’s shoulder, but the man leans back out of reach, holding up his palm, bracing it with a small smile, asking for forgiveness even as he asks for distance. Steve can offer him both.

~*~

It’s Steve’s turn to lounge on the shower ledge as Natasha samples the body washes, choosing something darkly floral that fills the space with a night blooming scent.

Far as he knows, Banner is still in the silver chair, unpersuaded to join them.

“The Mayor told me it might be better if I didn’t come back tomorrow,” he says, and tries to find that place of ironic detachment Romanoff seems so good at, hoping he doesn’t sound pissy and bitter.

“It’s not personal,” she says, hearing it anyway, “you’re a symbol, but you also represent the disaster. They need a clear message. The sense of _we can take it from here_.”

He shrugs, but it’s anticlimactic to suddenly be done, to have to look forward, no transition time. He lets himself mutter, “Thanks for your service, don’t let the door hit your kevlared ass on the way out.”

She hums and tilts her head back, letting the water run over her body. He watches in appreciation. “You could go out of uniform. Volunteer in one of the smaller quadrants. Get some glasses, a ball cap, a sweatshirt; you’re just some big guy who can lift things.”

It is something that he’s thought of, but he doesn’t know where he stands. Back at SHIELD, he’d been so tempted to learn about normal - to walk away from their deceptions and agendas, to make a life as Steve Rogers, leave Captain America behind - but he didn’t know what he could possibly do instead, and so he just failed to decide.

And then the past few days, he’d felt that burning surge of purpose, doing that thing he’d been created to do, and suddenly it’s as hard to let go of as it had been to embrace.

“It’s not the work,” he starts to say, and Bruce opens the door to the shower, and asks “It’s the mileage?”

Natasha chuckles. “I know that one,” she says, and Bruce steps under the shower behind her, wetting his hair, nudging against her.

“Hey,” she says softly, and passes him the bath pouf. He takes it, runs it over her shoulders and back, sliding over her waist.

“Life as a civilian could be a challenge,” he says to Steve. She rinses off, and Bruce just stands under the water. 

“Feels like going undercover,” Steve says, tilts his head back against the tile, “but I don’t know which one’s my secret identity.”

Natasha brushes her foot along his calf on the way out of the shower. “I think it’s up to you,” she says, cryptic, but not unkind.

~*~

“Go with Stark to California.”

Natasha’s voice is so quiet, and Bruce is so tired, that her words seem like a dream.

She’s wearing the grey t-shirt he’d started the night in, duvet tucked around her hips, and she’s sitting against the headboard. He thinks she’s been watching them sleep.

Steve is taking up the bottom of the bed, sleeping on his belly with his hands thrown over his head, snoring delicately. He’s fucked out, exhausted, the broad stretch of his back still a little awe-inspiring.

“Why?” Bruce pushes up on his elbow to look at her. “Why do you care where I go?”

She shrugs and that’s maddening, but he has to just shake it off. Then she bites her lip, and says, “It’s a cage either way, but if you run…”

He waits her out.

She tilts her head back. “Stark wants you. He’ll make your life better. He can protect you.”

Bruce lets out a bitter laugh.

“Don’t,” she says. “It’s true. He can provide a wall of luxury and security. He likes giving people what they want, when he can.”

“I like Tony,” he says, finally. “And I don’t want to put him in danger. It doesn’t make--”

“Nick,” she interrupts, but won’t look at him. “Nick...is not gonna worry about what you want, or what feels comfortable. He wants you to be a weapon. He wants you to work for SHIELD.”

“Yeah, I got that.”

“No, I don’t think you do. If you run, we…”

He sits up higher.

“If you’re with Stark, you’re in the public eye. You’re protected because you’re hiding in plain sight. You can argue for autonomy, going where you want. You can…”

He’s never heard this thread of frustration in her tone.

She takes a deep breath. “If you run, SHIELD will make it a job to find you.”

He’s getting it now, but needs to hear her say it.

“It will be my job to find you. And I don’t…”

“Natasha, you don’t owe me anything.”

“I convinced you to be here.”

“I made the choice,” he says, a truth and a lie.

“I don’t want to take away your choices,” she says, “in the future. And I will have to.”

It feels a little like a punch, hard and stinging because he hears what she isn’t saying: _I don’t want to do this thing. That doesn’t mean I won’t_.

“I’ll think about it,” he says. “Honest.”

He puts his head down on her lap, and there’s a moment of hesitation before he feels her touch, tentative and delicate, thumb brushing his ear. She curls her fingers into his hair, the warmth of her palm soothing in a way that’s both a lie, and everything he needs.


	12. Epilogue: Tag, Your It

It’s a relief to be wearing clothes that fit, to feel her own identities slipping back into place, features more easily schooled.

The city is humming, vibrancy returning as the bridges and airspace open.

Maria Hill offers her a cup of coffee from the pot in her office, and Natasha signs off on the reports detailing her findings on each of the Avengers.

“Give them time,” she says. “Rogers will come back under the right circumstances. Thor and Banner? They’re not persuadable.”

“Doesn’t mean we won’t try,” Hill says, and Natasha shrugs.

She hadn’t said goodbye to Bruce. She’d woken, having slept for a few hours in spite of herself, with her fingers still buried in his hair, and his warm palm curled around her thigh, and she’d let herself linger, just for a moment, before rousing Steve, collecting Clint, reporting in.

She didn’t want to think about what she might have said or failed to say, if she’d given herself the time to think, looking at him dazed and drowsy and lovely.

Hill had sent a car. She was done waiting for her agents to make their way.

“Barton?” she prods.

“Needs some leave. Therapy. To get back on the horse.” It’s not exactly the remedy she’d like to recommend, but she can’t be Clint’s friend in here, just his partner. She’ll take care of him in her own way, whatever the recommendation, working with his wife and kids to give him what he needs.

“And you?”

“I’m fine.”

Hill raises a perfect eyebrow. “Any of that assessment gonna change when you present it to Fury?”

“No.”

Maria is in her uniform, which office work generally doesn’t require, but Natasha guesses she hasn’t been home to change either.

Still, while the kevlar conveys a sense of purpose, Hill has allowed a little of the compassion that she keeps tucked away to show on her face.

“Two days,” she says, “then Germany. Take Barton to...well, wherever it is he goes when he’s not our problem. Your flight leaves from JFK.”

Germany. It stings a little, payback for not promptly returning to headquarters, but it’s the type of petty punishment she can live with. And better her making restitution for Clint’s actions under Loki’s command than anyone else.

If he is ever able to ask, she will have a truth to offer him.

She nods at Maria. Stands. “That all?”

Maria steps around the desk, bringing a bag. It’s worn, solid canvas and leather, brass fixtures. Banner’s.

“For the good doctor,” she says.

Natasha hefts it, weighing a life packed into this duffle. 

“The other thing was delivered this morning,” Hill says. “Nick just laughed. It’s downstairs.”

~*~

Rogers’ bike is a replica with a modern engine, but he's staring at it in the parking garage like he’s seeing a ghost.

She purses her mouth, and Clint yawns around a paper cup of coffee. “You could have told them you needed transportation,” she says to Steve, who shrugs her off.

“Thank you,” he says instead.

“I didn’t do anything but fill out the paperwork,” she says, unwilling to take credit.

She and Clint get in the sedan, following Steve out into traffic. He’s loose limbed, riding the motorcycle like he’s part of it, easy as punching space whales, as full of grace as she’s seen him, even spent from sex and pleasure and that amazing fucking shower.

For a moment, Rogers looks like he’s come home.

~*~

It’s a different world than the one he’d woken up to a week ago, half a world away.

This morning, he found himself alone in Steve’s giant bed, startled awake by JARVIS’ bleated warning right before Tony entered the suite barking, “Up and at ‘em, orgy’s over.”

Bruce scrubbed at the back of his head.

“Got a date with some gods,” Tony said, clapping his hands, tossing pants and a shirt at the bed. “Get dressed.”

Bruce waited for Tony to leave, and when he didn't, Bruce got out of bed and pulled on clothes that probably equaled the rent of his nicest apartment.

The fit is perfect.

At least now, trying to maintain his composure as he takes the duffel of all his worldly possessions back from Natasha, he’s firm in the knowledge that his ass looks as good as it’s capable of looking.

Bruce takes the bag from her hands, and realizes he doesn’t know what to say. She’s back in a type of uniform - her own clothes, clearly - her face a mask, if a beautiful one.

It’s not like he isn’t inhabiting his own secret identity, his duality. He understands. He wants to tell her that. Instead, he just says, “Thank you.”

She shrugs. “Hill says your glasses didn't make it. Sorry.”

He wonders how that reset works for her. His future has opened up, even if temporarily. He has opened himself up--to possibility, to work, to companionship for however long he can stand the risk, the weight of it, the heaviness of the burden he carries and the devastating implications when he fails.

Much like the joy of untempered lust, release and warmth, he wants to be open to things while it’s still an option.

They are leaving behind a city still in chaos, but rebuilding. A nascent bond of camaraderie, a team in the making. Alien life looming over human civilization.

She lets him shoulder the weight of the bag, and he hesitates but finally turns away, putting it in the back of the convertible. 

Loki is in chains, face ripe with a sneer but tempered. Thor simply looks weary as he says his goodbyes, and opens the door to another world.

The gods go home, the spies lean shoulder to shoulder impassively, and Nick Fury gives Bruce a nod and Tony a look as they all separate.

Bruce clasps Steve’s hand, nods to the bike. “Seeing the country?” 

“Gonna tour, think about the future.” He tilts his head at Natasha who is deep in a silent, eyebrow-laced conversation with Barton. “You should call her. When the dust clears.”

Bruce turns up his mouth, half smile, half grimace. “I think it’s gonna be dusty for a long time,” he says.

Steve shrugs. “Doesn't hurt to think about it.”

Bruce shrugs back. “See ya.”

Steve gets on the bike, taking off like a matinee idol. Bruce watches, admiring.

“He’s still a showgirl,” Natasha says in his ear. He doesn’t know how she got there, and he doesn’t lean into her, but he doesn’t startle either.

“You can take the gal out of the theater,” he chuckles.

She grins, inching close enough that their arms press together.

“I don’t do sappy goodbyes,” she says, but her voice is soft. He still doesn’t know what to say, doesn’t even know how he’d decide. He’s awed by her, dazzled, terrified, entranced. It’s too big for this part of his life, but he can’t imagine saying goodbye. Doesn’t know where they go from here.

He tangles their fingers together, squeezing her hand briefly before letting go.

She nods like she gets it, and she looks over her shoulder, cocky as fuck but with warmth on her face.

“Be seeing you, doc,” she says, and her expression is open, real. He recognizes her as the woman he saw shake in fear and pleasure and fatigue, and he wants to beg her to stay. 

And then she shuts it down.

She turns her head and sets her shoulders, and he watches her go.

Tony is watching him, eyebrows doing a little dance of lewd suggestion, but Bruce just says, “Let’s go,” and contemplates the idea of a future.

**Author's Note:**

> This is a direct result of [this particular scene/GIF](http://thassalia.tumblr.com/post/139802870330/handypolymath-thassalia-handypolymath).
> 
> Feldman indulged my desire to see this enacted with what became the prologue of this story, tagged in to multiple parts to guide it, and ultimately made it make any kind of coherent sense with a hardcore beta read and edit. Because she is, in fact, the best. And entirely to blame.


End file.
